Wikipédia:Brouillons/Mike

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Dear Mike,

As you may know by now, there's been some turmoil on :fr, and we would appreciate your advice before we take action.

For the past few months, one of our top users, Hegesippe Cormier (HC), a former sysop and still a prominent member of the community, has been targeted by a continual harassment from someone that was blocked sometime ago. The vandal of course came back using his provider's floating IP addresses and, along with a significant amount of article vandalisms, has been directly aiming its bile at HC. It basically went from inserting niceties such as "HC is a bozo" (and creating usernames such as "HC_is_a_bozo") to writing mocking emails directly to HC. He created several dozen dormant sockpuppets that end up doing sneaky vandalism. We've been blocking and reverting all along, but you will understand that this is getting tiring for everyone, first and foremost for our dear HC (about 20 sysops and 2 bureaucrats have been involved too). This is not your average vandal, but a couple of orders of magnitude beyond.

HC sent a couple of emails and letters (with IP addresses logs he got through Check User requests) to the abuse service of the man's provider, to no avail. The best answer he got was "secure your communications interface" (no kidding). Either they don't understand, or they don't care.

We have taken into account your suggestion to treat this user with irony, reverting all his changes, and adding a small ironic message, but it is eventually taking us too much time to do so: This has gone too far, for too long, and there's been a general agreement among sysops that we need to take some more drastic steps, going as far as blocking the provider's whole IP address blocks (which has in fact been enacted for a couple of hours before discussions led to this mail). Some of us argue that it would be better politics to (1) send a registered mail with a Wikimedia France header to the provider and request him to enforce his own Terms of Use (using the logs we'll provide him), and warn him that (2) if he doesn't comply within, say, 15 business days, block his IP address range, post a sitenotice giving the reason for the block (as well as their abuse address) and sending out a press release in the French media announcing our action so as to give them as much bad publicity as they could possibly get. The letter has been drafted already, and that's basically what it says (in a nice, decent, friendly-but-matter-of-fact manner) .

So here are our questions to you, awaiting your honest (and legal) opinion:

Considering this cannot go on, and that some action needs to be taken,

• can we send such a letter on behalf of Wikimedia France (we've got WF board members ready and willing to do it);
• can we block a provider's full range of IPs (500k +) for an indeterminate amount of time;
• can we advertise this through all means possible if the provider decides not to enforce its own terms of service.

We are looking forward to hearing from you a.s.a.p. Please post on fr:Wikipédia:Vandalisme de longue durée/Affaire ANNE-MARGUERITE & co so that we can see it all (hearsay from IRC isn't the best for accurate communication) and discuss the way forward,

Regards,

The French Wikipedia community.