User:Guerillero/Bobrayner's Law

Bobrayner's Law states that: Mentoring is a bad investment decision: $(P^{reform} * W^{lc}) - (W^{supervision} + W^{mentor}) < -W^{RBI}$, where:
 * $P^{reform}$ is the likelihood that mentoring actually works,
 * $W^{lc}$ is the future good work done by [the person],
 * $W^{supervision}$ is the time that people still spend looking over the reformed editor's shoulder,
 * $W^{mentor}$ is the effort by the mentor, and
 * $W^{RBI}$ is the ongoing effort of RBI in the no-change scenario. (And we treat the latter three Ws as negatives; they're time that good editors could spend doing something else instead)

In plain english, bringing a banned editor back into the community is a bad decision when their potential contribution to the project (modified by the chance of them reforming their ways) is less than the amount of time need to supervise them. $$W^{RBI}$$ is assumed to be fairly close to zero.

Example
User:Example has been banned from Eastern Europe for the past year and is currently appealing their topic ban. They have strong opinions about the topic area and can not offer a list of potential ways they can improve the topic area. They have never broken their topic ban. Allowing them back into the area is a poor decision because the encyclopedia will gain very little by letting them back into the area and a relaxation of their topic ban would require many editors to spend time watching their edits.

Source

 * Original Thread