Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/David Gerard, Neutrality, Cyrius

Violation of Wikipedia:Blocking policy policy by an administrator.

I'm taking this case on myself for personal resolution.

Based on my own investigations (including looking at ip numbers, etc.) it is clear that the user in question is not 142, but rather most likely a sock puppet for another user, and so David Gerard's block was mistaken. However, based on the evidence (which I feel he has pointed out quite adequately), it was clearly a judgment call made in good faith. Because the Recycling Troll was making a pest of himself by harassing RickK and hammering the mailing list with facetious strawman arguments, I see no reason for us to make a big deal of it.

Our social policies are not a suicide pact. They are in place to help us write the encyclopedia. Going around pestering RickK pointlessly and writing inane messages to the mailing list are clearly not attempts to help us do that, but are rather just someone disrupting wikipedia to illustrate a point. So I'm blocking User:The Recycling Troll indefinitely. He's been a very successful troll, he's caused a lot of trouble, and he's most likely a sock puppet anyway.

We need to take due process seriously, but we also need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in anarchy, it's a project to make the world a better place by giving away a free encyclopedia. When the user in question is acting this way, we can cut some serious slack to administrators who are doing the good work of defending us from nonsense. --Jimbo Wales 19:38, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/David Gerard, Neutralilty, Cyrius -- Archive