A few days ago, I edited the {{warning}} template to add a category to it inside includeonly tags (Google them). The category that I was adding was the “Users who have been given a warning” category. Soon after, Krystle sent me a message saying that she removed the category, because it was decided a long time ago that we shouldn’t tag users that have been warned into a category. Sorry to bore you with the whole story, now on to the real business. We figured that it would be best to get a new consensus on the subject. So… what do you guys think? Should we add users with warnings to a certain category to check up on them, or not?
system
2
I am not sure we need to keep an eye on anyone, almost all users who are simply here to have a little fun at wikiHow’s expense goes elsewhere pretty soon, so you would end up with a category full of non-issues. Those who do return to vandalize are usually blocked, occasionally multiple times, but eventually they get bored an go on to vandalize wikipedia or some other more exciting website. All in all, it only takes seconds to look at a contribution history to see if the person is a vandal, so if this comes to a vote, I cast a no vote.
Maniac
4
While it may help for organization purposes… I don’t foresee any reason we would ever have to group people together whom have received the {{warning}}, {{unwanted}}, {{test}}, or any other similar template. Vandals aren’t really a group of people to track, we don’t really keep track of how many warning messages people have received (automatically, anyway), and if a person removes the message from their talk page, they are just as quickly removed from the category.
Linus
5
What would make this more useful would be the number of times a user has been warned. While I agree with @BR
, this could be useful as a statistical tool. For example, a user with one or two warnings may not be a true vandal but someone with 10 warnings would be. These aren’t hard numbers, but having the information may make it easier for an admin to judge to ban. At the moment, I’m neutral on the subject.
I’m neutral as well. There is a such thing as a reformed vandal, someone who goes from vandalizing to making productive contributions. Based on that, here are some questions that I think need to be looked at on the community side of this issue: If a vandal changes his or her ways, would he/she still be on the list/tagged? Would having a list discourage people from becoming productive contributors? If someone hacks the account of a productive contributor in order to vandalize and they get warned, would the tag be removed later?
I’m with BR on this. Plus, we base block duration on recency and count of blocks, this is made available to us in the Block History at the point of blocking so I’m less fussed about having a count of warnings.
I vote no. A warning should not be a scarlet letter you need to wear for a long time. We’ve had people start at wikiHow as vandals and then become admins. That’s only possible if we don’t get too aggressive on our treatment of those who do stupid things at one point.
