User:Monty845/Sanctions against editors are punishment

This tiger was never allowed the freedom to roam the zoo, and is kept in a cage not to punish the animal but to prevent it from hurting people. However if the tiger had been allowed to roam the zoo, and was only locked in the cage after repeatedly eating visitors, because the zookeepers were tired of the tiger eating the visitors, then the cage would be a punishment.

Wikipedia operates under the fiction that blocks are not punishments. Yet the first definition of punishment in Wiktionary is: "1. The act or process of punishing, imposing and/or applying a sanction." One of the classic purposes of punishment is to deter future conduct. The Deterrence (legal) article provides the background, and starts off by mentioning in the lead that "Deterrence is the use of punishment..." The blocking policy explicitly states that "Blocks are used to prevent damage or disruption to Wikipedia, not to punish users", but also that blocks should be used to "2) deter the continuation of present, disruptive behavior". Using the above definitions, it is clear that a block made to deter future conduct is a punishment. The community refuses to reconcile the inconsistency, and would prefer to continue to block people as punishment, while at the same time denying what are being done are punishments.

It is abundantly clear that the community does not accept retribution or retaliation as justifications for punishment. The problem is that at some point, punishment became synonymous with retribution in the eyes of a large portion of the community. This has lead to frequent charges that blocking administrators are hypocritical or ignoring policy; the admin blocks an editor as a punishment for misconduct, and then claim its not a punishment, because they did it only for the legitimate reason of stopping the current disruption, and deterring future misconduct after the block expires. But again, regardless of why the person was blocked, the block is a punishment as understood by those outside the Wikipedia community.

When the common understanding of the words in a core policy are at odds with how the community interprets them, it is a serious problem. It bites new editors, and sours their experience. While there is some noble spirit behind the not punishing ideology, it causes ongoing disruption and disenfranchisement far in excess of the value of that spirit. Administrators should not change how they actually carry out the blocking policy, all that needs to change is for the community to call a spade a spade.

See Also

• Wikipedia:Sanctions against editors are not punishment