User blog comment:Obsidion Darkhart/Consequences of vandalism (Passed)/@comment-3122926-20100926070713

Okay I'd like to add a counter-point to this policy based on a recent example. Malenovolence. The lad was new to the wiki and was editing pages by adding categories which seemed necessary to him. Now, NickyLinnea and I continuously sent messages to him on his talk page warning him to stop his unneeded edits. It seemed as though he was ignoring us as he continued to add the categories to these pages. We put a 3 day ban on him. After the time period elapsed, he awoke from his "exile" and sought to do good edits to the wiki, apologizing for his misconduct on my talk page. He said that he was new to the wiki and he did not notice the message notifications. Ever since that point he's been doing quite a list of helpful edits, and has been interacting with users in a civilized manner. Now this is a case when a user commits vandalism, though it may seem intentional, but actually it not being so. Maybe we shouldn't be so strict on such vandalism. A three day ban followed by reasoning with the user could be our policy. But when a user does harmful edits and ignores the pleas of others, only to reveal in the end that he did it just for getting badges, shouldn't that be considered vandalism (this was not the case of Malenovolence)?. Same question with cases of users blankly editing pages without any obvious changes made, just for boosting his/her edit count?