"On June 10, the Wikimedia Foundation did something unprecedented in its decade and a half history: It banned a user from the English-language Wikipedia for a year."
No they didn't. From editing it, perhaps; and using one specific persona. Anyone can read wikipedia without being logged in, and it's trivial to create a new account on any site.
That's nitpicking. When someone says they're banned from Twitter it means their account can't be used to make tweets, not that they cannot read Twitter while logged out, or that they can't make a new Twitter account.
Well, from where I sit, it's a huge difference in terms of how much I should care about it. I have a limited amount of outrage and try to ration it to the issues that are the largest societal problems.
The point isn't that there isn't a difference between the two ideas: it is that clearly the word "banned" means the latter, not the former, and so it is strange that anyone could possibly have misinterpreted the sentence.
No they didn't. From editing it, perhaps; and using one specific persona. Anyone can read wikipedia without being logged in, and it's trivial to create a new account on any site.