Having just read this bit of crazy "we shall banish the banned users' comments and those who would talk with a banned user will be in violation of policy", I got to thinking:

Has anyone ever counted the number of indefinitely blocked (banned) human beings that Wikipedia has chewed up and spit out? Not user accounts, mind you, but people. I don't want sockpuppets throwing off the numbers. I'm really just interested in the number of people. And, let's say we limit to those who ever got at least 10 decent edits under their belts. I don't want to count some user who left a drive-by, one-time death threat on the Tiffany (singer) article's Talk page or something.

Treat this like a Fermi problem. I'm not expecting an exact answer, but rather, something in the ballpark. Maybe we can use the "wisdom of crowds" method, and I could average everyone's best guess. This Wikipedia page is a "selective list" of banned users, but why do I get the feeling that they didn't cite nearly all of them? I know for a fact that I myself added a reference to a banned user that Jimbo himself had banned. So, if the hive had missed one so prominent, and it took little old me to notice it for the first time, this list can't possibly be comprehensive. I'm too lazy to count the list but, it looks like roughly 75 primary accounts.

I'll get the ball rolling . . .

I guess that 145 human beings who have ever made 10+ edits in Wikipedia are currently indefinitely blocked from the site.

P.S. I'm thinking of making a "Banned from Wikipedia Club", where we could all get together in major urban centers, with our lovely spouses and kids, and talk about our actual (not fabricated) advanced degrees, and muse on why we can't name more than 2 Pokemon characters (if even that). I think it would provide behavioral psychologists with ample material for a case study comparing and contrasting the BfWC attendees and Wikimania attendees. Maybe we could even plan rival "meet-ups" at the next-closest restaurant from Wikipedia meet-ups. There might even be a rumble after the BfWC's have downed their last Johnny Walker Blue and the Wikimeeters have quaffed their last Mountain Dew.

Greg

Ah yes, "DennyColt" - now there's a real gem of a feller! I suspect even the hard-core "cabal" types are appalled by that guy. Once they make him an admin, he'll make User:Cyde look like Mahatma Gandhi... But at least so far nobody has responded to his little "idea," which suggests that there's at least some hope for the WP folks and their immortal souls after all.


Someone brought that up here a year ago, I vaguely recall...? I'm too lazy to look it up, but I think this number of yours is actually fairly accurate, though it's probably on the low side. My guess would be about 250, and no more than 350.

Obviously there's no way to know for certain, though...


You'd have to make several exceptions for me, then! I'm not banned (since I don't have an account there in the first place), I'm only near a minor urban center, I have no spouse or kids (just an ex, though she is lovely), and no advanced degrees.

Of course, the only Pokemon character I know of is Bulbasaur, but we're all familiar with that one around here.

Last year I did a count of the indef blocks in Slim's and Jayjg's block list -- I'm pretty sure they numbered more than 145. I did not correct for edit count, though. Perhaps I will have to run the count again.

Yes, because Bulbasaur was a featured article which made every visitor aware of how much fancruft was on Wikipedia as opposed to real knowledge.

I think more to the point is why they have been banished.

How many were banned for daring to dispute Slim Virgin or Raul654 or Snowspinner or some other favoured admin?

How many were banned because they thought they were sock puppets, but they weren't really?

How many were banned because they dared to suggest that Wikipedia might not be perfect?

How many were banned so as to win an edit war?

How many were banned because they caught someone lying in an article?

And then how many of the bans were simply because someone blanked a page?

I can bet that very few were "legitimate" bans, in proportion terms. 40%? I don't know. I mean Wikipedia should ban people who destroy their product. But I don't see them doing that very much. The Sinbad death person wasn't banned, while they banned someone who asked for an article about them to be removed.

My guess would be that it's in the thousands. If you count the number of irreplacably valuable contributors who voted with their feet after one or two or a thousand tries at working within the system, then the loss of human resources is incalculable.

Please do not forget that the oaficious reason cited for the ban is seldom ever the real reason. People get banned for one and only one real reason, and that is for opposing the will of the cabal. The first time you do that you probably don't even know it, probably don't even know that there is a cabal, but they put a mark on your head that accumulates each time you buck the party line — and then they ban you for a trumped-up offense, the likes and worse of which your average cabal member commits with impunity 40 times a day.

If you don't know this, then you haven't really been there ...

Jonny

It's got to be over 500. Most cases fly under the radar screen, and there is a LOT of admin abuse.

I am genuinely surprised that so many think it is over 500!

Keep in mind, my criteria are as follows:

- The person made 10 or more edits in Wikipedia
- They have been blocked for the infamous INDEFINITE period of time (which is the definition of "banned")

Don't count actual sockpuppets -- a person can only count once in this tally. And don't count legitimate "new" users who got in less than 10 edits before being labeled a bannable sock. Don't count people who left voluntarily. They have to have been involuntarily banned.

I'm not arguing with the findings of the survey -- I just want to be sure everyone understands exactly what I'm looking for.

If it's really that many, I just might start up the club -- maybe as a 501© non-profit entity. How funny would that be, to take tax-deductible donations to serve the mission of "educating people about the dangers of open-source references"?

Greg

You are forgetting things like the right to disappear, and the fact that user page notices often get edited after the fact.

A more interesting question would be : How many articles and edits would be lost if you really went out and deleted all articles created and edits made by banned users?

There are days when I am tempted to take my 13,000+ edits and go home, but my brain just ain't hooked up that way.

Gimme time, mebbe ...

Jonny

There is a list, Wikipedia:List_of_banned_users. I counted 112 users (excluding alleged sock puppet accounts) listed on that page.

This list contains those banned after significant public fuss. It does not contain those banned by individual administrators for alleged "disruption", "racism", etc nor does it list most of those who have been subject to community bans (both before and after the creation of the community incident board.) Of course, this list also doesn't list the collateral damage bans of complete innocents who happened to edit the wrong articles at the wrong time.

I would estimate that there are a couple dozen, but no more than 100 users who have been community banned that are not listed on that page.

There are an uncountable of editors who have been banned by individual editors for getting in a heated administrator confrontation. While some of these editors run into abuse or POV pushing admins, many of these users are just not the type that should be editing an encyclopedia (they might be crazy, really angry, obsessive in a bad way, or just can't handle authority figures.) These indef bans are often not true "user indef bans" because the users behind the accounts are often not really identifiable and thus can easily reappear under a new account and start editing (and if they have the right personality will end up getting banned again by another administrator who has no idea that the user has been banned before.) It is these mysterious problematic users who are most likely to result in collateral damage bans of innocents by overly paranoid administrators.

Then there are the obvious vandals, but unless they are long term problems I guess they don't count as "banned users" just a lot of "banned accounts."

There is this category Category:Banned Wikipedia users which contains 176 user pages.

And there is this category Category:Wikipedia sockpuppeteers which contains at least 605 user pages.

There is also the large number of user-specific sockpuppet categories: Category:Wikipedia_sockpuppets and Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_sockpuppets. There seems to be 408 user-specific "Wikipedia sockpuppets" categories and 806 user-specific "Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets" categories. Of course there is significant overlap between these two numbers.

Yes, this looks like a manually-compiled list that nobody really bothers to update except for the truly "notable" bannees (top bananas?) ...

Let's call it the J-E-L-L-O List ...

Jonny

The poll is too vauge, remember many users got blocked indef for vandalism to 10 or more pages, some was banned because of mass abusive sockpupperty like Mike Garcia, General Tojo, and Starwars1955, and some were banned/blocked because of massive copyright violations, like Primetime. So they should be discounted as obvious. May it should be raised to at least 50-100 edits. Also most users are banned for a reason you know.

As typical with Wikipedia that list is not right.... i'm not on the list as well as scores of others... They are hidding the true extent of the dead editors from there blog.

Not to bump this post, but I just saw a nice quote on Wikipedia tonight:

Banned users are banned for good reasons

Wonderful argument, with perfect, self-fulfilling logic.

It's just like arguing with a robot, except a robot usually has at least a 50-50 chance of doing the right thing!

If User:Thatcher131 is so concerned about "considering the interests" of all these admins whose identities are exposed, then why would he want that sort of thing to continue by continuing to piss off BLP victims?

Of course, this is the same guy who wrote up the rejected Protecting children's privacy proposal, which sought to "forestall the drama associated with interactions between naive children, adult predators, and sting operations by law enforcement" - mostly by banning people who self-identify as children (after the self-identifying evidence information was removed, of course). Pedophilia, well... that's one thing, but drama? That would just be totally unacceptable!

Unfortunately, Thatcher131 didn't define an minimum age for these "children," and when roughly 75 percent of the Wikipedian community became concerned that they would be banned under the proposal for being under the limit, they rejected it.

As I recall, there was also considerable discussion about the problem of children not being able to legally consent to the GFDL, and parents then suing Wikipedia for the rights to their content...

The Very Truly nice thing about a Veritable Tenet of Very True Belief is that it saves the Very True Believer all the bother of WP:VERIFYINGTHEFUCKINGTRUTHOFIT.

Just one of the many good reasons that WP:V... is no more.

Jonny

Ya gotta love this threat: "I'd hate to bother Jayjg about you but I'm pretty sure what he'd find.". Classic Stalinist secret police stuff!!

Didn't everyone get the memo that Jimbo himself unblocked you and you are free to edit unharassed? Oh, I know I came to the Anti-Wiki party late, but more stuff like this and I'll start agreeing that Wikipedia is evil. I actually liked Thatcher but placing the rights of Wikipedians before the rights of the people they write about is just plain wrong.

I do often wonder how many people get banned just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, a major edit war ends and everyone rejoices that the users they despised are finally gone only for some innocent new guy to come in and start editting the article and its "Its a sockpuppet! Get him!"

I feared such a scenario when I first started my Wiki-career and my career isn't over... yet anyway.

No, I decidedly believe that Jimbo's unblock of me was a "quiet" deal, and we're really headed for a doozy of a sh*tstorm when somebody gets it in their craw the conflict between Jimbo's un-ban and the "community ban" that was also leveled against me. (How do you lift a community ban? Has that ever been done? Does a Jimbo unblock automatically cancel a community ban?)

Anyway, I have re-entered the Wikipedia minefield very cautiously with some edits using a new User name (it's so creative, I hardly need to mention it here). Anyone with half a brain who would take 2 minutes to look at the new User page and follow the links would absolutely know with 100% certainty that Gregory Kohs is the person behind it, but I don't overtly "announce" that.

JzG (Guy Chapman) hasn't said a word about my unblockitude yet, which strikes me as a clear signal that "the memo" has definitely not circulated through the hive yet. There's no way he could restrain his big mouth from pontificating on this subject, if he knew about it.

I have to tread carefully with this new account, because I don't want the ad hominem criticism coming up: "He's using the account only to cause trouble on Wikipedia Talk pages!" So, I've been making some splendid additions to the [[Czech Air Force]] page and created an article about performance artist [[Liz Cohen]]. (Whom you all should check out, by the way. There's nothing hotter than a Jewish babe who looks stunning in a bikini, who is also handy with a welding torch and can convert an East German Trabant into a Chevy El Camino. Tell me, is that or is that not hot? I only wonder how much of the auto conversion is actually her talent at work, versus the other guys in the body shop. Still, she probably has 17 times the knowledge of auto body work than I do, so who am I to cast doubts?)



Greg

Someone should start a list of people banned from WP and the "reason" given

Looks like that account is banned.

"Gregory Kohs is banned by community consensus."

Here is the diff from the heads up to JzG from DennyColt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=118879154

JzG says you must now appeal your community ban. You'll have to e-mail an Arbitrator or an Arbitration Clerk and ask for your case to be heard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=118879786

I thought they were actually going to let you go seeing as Jimbo unblocked you.