Ever since the advent of legal thinking about bans was first carved into stone tablets (some 3769 years ago), the party enacting the ban was obliged to prove just cause. Failing to present a valid proof of just cause not only invalidated the ban, it subjected the would-be banner to the death penalty. This was not just some random law. This was literally the very first law ever carved into stone tablets.
What we see at Wikipedia is a manipulation of the practice of blocking/banning/blacklisting that verges on corruption. A community ban would at least correspond to a Parliamentary Bill of Attainder (a practice forbidden by Article I of the US Constitution and also abandoned by the British legal system). Capricious blocks, predicated on the presumption that the community would then become hopelessly deadlocked, is not a very intelligent way to manage a 21st Century community that purports to be manifesting the sum of all human knowledge under the umbrella of a tax-exempt educational non-profit. Do the donors appreciate that Wikipedia is teaching 21st Century youth to engage in corrupt political practices that were already going out of style 3769 years ago?
|