The best analogy is a jury trial It does not take a majority vote or an almost complete consensus it requires a complete consensus and has to be decided beyond a reasonable doubt Blocking an otherwise constructive editor is a serious step particularly a block as long as a week or two and must not be done if there is any doubt about the need for that block The question to ask is what would be the consequences if there was no block If damage to Wikipedia could be prevented by a block then a block can be appropriate Many vandals just move on instead of continuing to vandalize after escalated warnings and no block is needed One turned to venting at the talk page of the warner but stopped their vandalism In the case of the editor who was accused of using automation by making one edit that used a spreadsheet to sort a table a simple undo of that edit and a discussion of whether that constituted a violation of the topic ban on that editors talk page would have been sufficient instead of preventing them from working productively on Wikipedia by asking for and obtaining a block No I am not joking Blocks are serious impediments to editing and are too big a stick to wield lightly The principle in consensus decision making is that even if one person out of 6 000 disagrees they just might be right In my case I have not done any edits recently anyway because of doing other WM work that is unaffected by the block and of course there are many other WM projects that I can apply my talents to during the next week I could learn German or another language for example