User:Robert McClenon/Thoughts on Discretionary Sanctions

Purpose of Discretionary Sanctions
This is one editor's answer to a question from the ArbCom: "What do you see as the purpose of discretionary sanctions? What do you view as the problems that discretionary sanctions were designed to solve?" The purpose of discretionary sanctions is to provide an expedited technique for dealing with areas where persistent disruptive editing makes development and maintenance of the encyclopedia difficult. Discretionary sanctions, which should maybe be called expedited sanctions or accelerated sanctions, permit:
 * The blocking of disruptive editors via a procedure that will not be unilaterally lifted by another admin;
 * The imposition of topic-bans on disruptive editors by a single admin rather than requiring action by the community or the ArbCom;
 * The imposition of revert restrictions on pages and on editors.

As the plague essay explains, the plague of Wikipedia is nationalism. Nationalism too often causes editors to ignore both the second pillar of Wikipedia, which is neutral point of view and the fourth pillar of Wikipedia, which is civility. Many of the areas covered by discretionary sanctions are areas that have been subject to battleground editing because they have been historical battlegrounds. The area with the most ArbCom cases, four, has been Palestine and Israel. Other battleground areas that are subject to discretionary sanctions include India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, which is at least two war zones, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. World War One began in the Balkan region, and nationalist disputes in the Balkans continue to be troublesome. Eastern Europe was devastated by World War Two and then divided by the Cold War. A variant of battleground editing over nationalism is seen in American politics, a large and diverse nation that is split by competing visions of what the nation should be: One nation, two forms of nationalism.

There is one area in which discretionary sanctions have been used for a different, and in my opinion entirely valid, reason, and that is biographies of living persons, where discretionary sanctions are another tool in the tool box and another arrow in the quiver of administrators to deal with a few editors who might otherwise cause real harm to real people. Any reforms that are made to discretionary sanctions should be tailored so that they do not weaken their availability with regard to BLP violations.

Some of the areas other than nationalism and BLPs where discretionary sanctions have been used are areas where a few editors have a single-purpose persistence that resembles that of nationalists.

One of the original purposes of discretionary sanctions was to allow administrators to impose topic-bans and other limited sanctions on disruptive editors. Since discretionary sanctions have been introduced, there have been at least two further developments. The first is that the Arbitration Enforcement procedures have developed and evolved. They have made the use of discretionary sanctions more structured, which has advantages, but also makes them less rapid.

The second change, which may have reduced the need for discretionary sanctions by providing an alternate tool in the tool box and arrow in the quiver, is partial blocks. While a block and a ban are different, and a partial block and a topic-ban are different, both partial blocks and topic-bans can be used to restrict troublesome editors without excluding them from editing. If administrators are encouraged to impose partial blocks unilaterally, that may reduce the need for a special structured regime for dealing with disruption.

I have two possible ideas about the future of discretionary sanctions. The first would be to use the experience from discretionary sanctions in troubled editing areas to develop a structured approach to disruptive editing in general. If the structured handling of disruptive editing in battleground areas has been useful, can it be extended to other areas? Expansion would require community buy-in, since it is probably outside the scope of ArbCom. The second is, alternatively, that maybe discretionary sanctions are no longer needed in areas other than BLP violations, because administrators should be encouraged to partially block disruptive editors.