How do you evaluate an editor? One way is by looking at their block log. No one actually reads the block log, or tries to evaluate whether the blocks were bogus, they just see if it’s empty. It is also an unwritten requirement for passing an RFA.
If someone is in a dispute, and an admin doesn’t want to take the time to figure out what the dispute is about, they can just look at the block log, and if someone has already been blocked in the past, that person will just get blocked again, even if there was a very lengthy discussion somewhere in an archive exonerating them.
The block log is accessible to anyone, but the history of any block discussion is hidden in layers of archives, and probably inaccessible to anyone but the most determined diff-scavenger.
So you can see this is a way to damage another editor quickly, and permanently.
For a long time, editors who were the victims of bad blocks were told that it was technically impossible to remove a block from the log, and that the logs were actually proof of improper conduct on the part of the admins.
But now it turns out that any admin can rev-delete a block log. When GorillaWarfare was blocked by Fram, her block log was scrubbed by User JzG, at the same time covering up Fram’s mistake.
I’m going to post it here again, just in case it gets deleted again.
This is actually one of the most intelligent unblock rationales I have ever seen, this by a journalism professor.
Undoing highly dubious block – talking about an individual’s behavior is not an automatic violation of our WP:NPA. Read the “What is considered to be a personal attack?” section and none of what the user said falls into those categories.
It’s a pity there aren’t more admins like this, but I don’t suppose you can expect journalism professors to spend a lot of time sorting out this type of nonsense on Wikipedia for free.
Gender Desk 