Am I dreaming, or have I wandered into some alternate
universe, or has the whole world gone insane, or what?
You're talking about a bunch of nerds who edit text on some
website here, not judges, police, soldiers... please for
god's sake have some sense of perspective.
Being an administrator is not "dangerous". There are more
than enough people volunteering to help (if you don't think
so, stop turning down RfAs for stupid reasons). If
someone's too chicken to issue a block, well whoopee-do,
that's their problem. Chances are the block wasn't
warranted anyway.
Administrators do not need body guards, alarm systems in
their house or indeed anything other than the common sense
not to post their credit card details online. Nobody has
ever been murdered in their sleep because they banned
someone on the Star Wars forum they moderate. We're talking
about the same kind of thing here.
Having a lovely time back in reality,
-Gurch
--- Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
On 9/20/07, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 20/09/2007, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>
wrote:
> There are plenty of admins that happily make their
real identity
> public knowledge and apparently aren't
so afraid of
"stalkers" that
> they're unwilling to block people.
There's probably
at least one of
> them online 24 hours a day. Get one of them
to make
the block.
I agree, that ought to be enough in most situations. It
would be good
to have something to fall back on if we end up
needing
to block
someone known to be dangerous, though.
If someone is known to be dangerous, shouldn't we be
calling the
police? How would having a pool account help matters?
The dangerous
person would just go after everyone in the pool, or
whoever set up the
pool, or Jimbo, or the board members (many of whose home
addresses are
easily found).
Maybe Jimbo would be willing to make the block in those
high profile
cases. I doubt his doing so would bring him any more
attention from
stalkers than he already has.
> If there are some gaps in that 24 hour
coverage, hire
someone to fill
> in those gaps. Pay them enough that they
can buy a
PO box, an alarm
> system for their house, etc. How does
society handle
having judges
> and police and presidents and soldiers and
other
figures who have to
> make and enforce decisions that rile up a
few
nutters? Not by making
> them unaccountable for their actions. If
Wikipedia
is a serious
> project creating a real benefit to society,
why
shouldn't it do the
> same thing? Being part of the wikipolice is
surely
less dangerous
than
being part of the real police.
Presidents have bodyguards. Judges generally have
police escorts if
they need them. Police and soldiers are trained
and
equipped to defend
themselves. Giving Wikipedia admins personal
protection
would be
taking things a little too far, IMHO ;).
For volunteers, yes. But if being an admin is so
dangerous that
enough people aren't volunteering, hiring one or two
people to
essentially be paid admins would be a possibility.
Creating a world
in which every single person can share freely in the sum
of human
knowledge is a big real world task which has costs and
risks involved
in it.
Personally I think there are probably enough volunteers
right now to
cover the task, and hiring someone would be overkill.
The solution is
as I said it a month or so ago. If you're not willing to
deal with
stalkers, don't be an admin, or at least don't be an
admin that
performs controversial actions. But if the choice is
between taking
away admin accountability (as suggested by Sarah) and
hiring a few
body guards, I think the latter is a much better choice.
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