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I have been banned from participating in review for approving a plagiarised suggested edit to a tag wiki.

Let's get this out of the way: that was a bad review. The content reads like an excerpt from documentation, and indeed it is. I should have noticed that and rejected it, or at least found the source and edited in a reference. Honestly, I appreciate this wake up call. It's a good reminder to be on the lookout for plagiarism.

I'm a bit confused by the duration of the ban, though. It lasts over a month:

Review ban screenshot indicating expiry on June 16

I searched around and found a few posts discussing review bans. This one looks like a good resource. Here are some excerpts from it:

Let's set a simple policy: Approving blatant plagiarism is a one-way ticket to a review ban.

I'm all for this.

Here's my (fairly conservative) definition of 'plagiarism' in this case:

  • The edit must be recent; we don't want to go through a whole backlog and ban reviewers who aren't doing anything wrong today. This is, essentially, a statute of limitations. Something that happened two days ago should be flagged; something that happened two weeks ago probably shouldn't. Use your judgment.

I'm not sure how many reviews I completed since April 26, but I'd be interested in seeing my failure rate over that time period. Does it matter whether I failed my only review over that timer period, or failed one review out of hundreds? Going back a year, I suspect this is one failure out of at least a thousand.

How long should the ban be? I don't think this needs to be long at all - just long enough to get the reviewers' attention. A single day would suffice in the vast majority of cases.

You definitely have my attention, and you got it within a day of instituting the ban. But for some reason I've been banned until mid-June.

Are single day bans no longer considered sufficient for the vast majority of cases?

Do I have a history of bad review and not know it?

Was this review bad enough to warrant special consideration, and earn a 32 day ban from all review queues?

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    Are single day bans no longer considered sufficient for the vast majority of cases? Given the surprising number of people who apparently never see that they're been review banned before they start reviewing again (and as a result have no opportunity to see that there's an issue they need to work on), having a long default duration makes sense to me. Now that you've clearly noted it, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets lifted. The long duration is a patch job by the mods for working around a less-than-optimal system.
    – CertainPerformance
    Commented May 15, 2020 at 21:46
  • If interested in details read meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/394498/… and especially linked duplicates... As @CertainPerformance said people are consistently coming with "why I' banned for X days from triage" post on meta turning out to missed very lengthy bans... I think missed 16 days ban was mentioned at least once. So I'd be not surprised that mods switched to month-long ban as default for manual bans.
    – Alexei Levenkov
    Commented May 15, 2020 at 22:58

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The review suspension system system was changed in 2020-07

In late July of 2020, Stack Overflow implemented a substantial change to the review suspension system (part of which was changing the name from "review ban" to "review suspension"). There were a lot of good improvements in the set of changes implemented at that time. Of particular note for this answer is that users are now always shown that they received a review suspension and the reason for that suspension, even if the next time they access the review pages is after the end of the review suspension period (i.e. even if they don't access the review pages while suspended). This significant change makes it no longer necessary for moderators to apply long suspensions in order to be sure to communicate to the user the issues which the moderator noted with the user's reviews.

As a consequence of that change, a large portion of my answer here is not fully applicable to current review suspensions, given that moderators no longer need to issue a long suspension in order to communicate with the user. The rest of this answer is, however, accurate for the situation which is being asked about in this question.

Original answer

In order to actually communicate to users, longer initial manual review bans are becoming more common

The effort to communicate to users what "Requires Editing" means in Triage (i.e. that the community can fix the post, not the original author) has resulted in a realization that a single day review ban is ineffective in many cases to communicate to the user that there was a problem. The message is often either just not seen or is ignored. Thus, it's appeared that some moderators have started to use longer initial manual ban periods to make sure that they actually communicate the problem to the user receiving the ban. So, I'm not surprised to see a longer ban, even if this is your first.

Keep in mind that the primary point of a review ban isn't to punish the user. The primary goal of non-permanent bans is to get the user to change, so they are doing good reviews, which requires the issue to be communicated to the user. Issuing a review ban is the least negative method moderators have of communicating the issue to the user. So, while a ban feels like punishment, it's not. It's been requested that the system be changed to allow a better way for moderators to communicate such issues to the user. It looks like changes are planned.

As has been mentioned in comments, moderators have appeared to be mostly interested in seeing that they've effectively communicated and that the user will change how they review. Thus, a moderator may choose to remove the ban, given your question here indicates you'll be more diligent in your reviews.

"edit must be recent" and "creative content" in Stopping tag wiki plagiarism, Part II: Taking Action

  • "edit must be recent": I read the intent there to be that people shouldn't be digging significantly through the backlog of review history, particularly the history prior the policy being in place, looking for plagiarism which was approved. If it comes to light, and was even moderately recent, then there's benefit to the review ban, as is clearly the case here: you've been informed there was a problem and will change how you review. That's an ideal result, IMO.

    Basically, while your review was "almost three weeks old" is beyond the "two weeks ago" mentioned in the linked question, the amount of time mentioned in that question was explicitly intended to be a judgement call, not a hard limit.

    As to what the "recent" criteria should be, it is, and should be, a moderator's judgement call, but keep in mind that a lot of the plagiarism in tag wikis is not caught until the next edit, which can be a considerable time. I'd say the criteria should be: "Will this user's future reviews be better if they are specifically informed that there was a problem with this review." If there's going to be benefit from informing the user, then a ban is worthwhile. That's, obviously, going to be mitigated by evidence that the user has already changed such that they are looking for plagiarism in subsequent tag wiki and tag excerpt reviews.

  • "creative content" is a term often used with respect to copyright. It's a term which is intended to differentiate between something that is too mundane to be copyrightable and things that can be copyrightable. The bar is quite low and has nothing to do with what people think of as "creative writing", which is the way you appear to be interpreting it. In other words, the fact that the writing was "fairly dry, basic, API documentation" has nothing to do with the text that was copied being "creative content".

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  • Fair point about the "almost three weeks", though I'm not trying to be a rules lawyer. The intent was to point out that I've done lots of review in over that time period, and much more before that time period. Assuming this is the only problematic review in the last 12 months, my "success rate" should quite high. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I suspect it's well over 99.9% for the past year. I'll see if I can clarify my post.
    – Chris
    Commented May 15, 2020 at 23:06
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    @ChrisF FYI, that flag was made the day the review was completed. After I saw it was blatant plagiarism, I kept that review tab open until it was completed to see the responses of other reviewers (I do this every time, even more strictly with tag edits). If even 1 votes to approve it then it'll get a custom flag. It's unfortunate that the flag took 3 weeks to get handled but the mods handle the mod flags they come across in whatever order they come across them. At least the wake up call had the intended effect :)
    – Nick is tired
    Commented May 15, 2020 at 23:39

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