But who can block a user
who decides who can block a user
what are users blocked for
It appears that all blocked users so far have been spambots.
Adminship on the wiki and on lesswrong.com are separate (they run on different software, with different user databases).
Here are the lesswrong.com moderators, though I think their powers are limited to editing posts and such. [Edit: that was incorrect, see Alicorn's reply.] Promoting posts is done by people labeled Editors (shown next to their karma score on their user pages), currently Eliezer, Robin Hanson, and wmoore. (I'm not sure if any of them actually do any editing/promoting other than Eliezer.)
And I don't think the LW software supports completely blocking a user, currently.
This user posted spam. I banned 4 such users today that posted similar spam. Admins can ban users on the wiki, usually that's just me. I'm not aware of any case where a user that's not a spambot was banned on the wiki.
Is there anything wrong with adopting a standard like 'if it would get you banned on Wikipedia, it gets you banned here'?
Is there anything wrong with adopting a standard like 'if it would get you banned on Wikipedia, it gets you banned here'?
Wikipedia has a lot of policies we wouldn't like. Neutral point of view would be the most obvious of them.
Do we even need to explicitly adopt such a standard at this point?
Wikipedia has its problems. I wouldn't be too eager to ape it in any detail.
Apparently we do given the existence of this Discussion post. Wikipedia's problems do not stem from its blocking policies but from subtler issues.
Didn't mean to imply that Wikipedia's blocking policies constitute a problem. Just that all we need here is the standard 'accounts that post spam will be blocked'. Which seems utterly uncontroversial, and doesn't even need to be made explicit.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Wikipedia's problems stem from a variety of issues, including seriously haphazard ways of determining what results in banning for anything other than absolutely cut and dried stuff. Wikipedia has a lot of different problems. The project succeeds primarily because the problems exist around the edge cases and the vast majority of editing never runs into them.
I noticed this recent Wiki edit:
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/User:AllisonGibbons
which says:
This user is currently blocked. The latest block log entry is provided below for reference: