[WikiEN-l] Re: What we need

[The Cunctator]

On 11/21/02 12:30 PM, "Larry Sanger" <lsanger at nupedia.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>> I don't mean to put words in your mouth of course.  I'm just saying that,
>>> IMO, Wikipedia is really suffering, and even losing people.  You're in a
>>> position to help embolden the most productive members of the project, who
>>> it seems to me are, in at least some cases, getting very discouraged.
>> 
>> I agree with all of this, except with your diagnosis of the current
>> situation.  Can you show me examples of "anarchists" who are arguing
>> that we "we might decide *not* to ban people for their trollish
>> behavior at all"?
> 
> First, I DON'T think there is a unified band of people who *call*
> themselves anarchists with all the same views.  I frankly don't care about
> the word.  The point is that there are now a lot of people about who hate
> one or more part of what, in my opinion and it so happens yours, defines
> Wikipedia, and that they're trying either to eliminate it or to weaken it
> radically (as Cunctator, just for example, would like to do with the
> nonbias policy).  Those are the people I am calling "anarchists."  I
> should probably call them "Wikianarchists" since their political views
> might very well not be in the anarchist camp.
> 
> Anyway, you want examples: Cunctator (he is now perfectly clear and
> unambiguous about it: see
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/006575.html ).
> So I trust that Cunctator disapproves of your recent banning of Lir.  TMC
> is another easy example.  If you put the question explicitly, you'd find a
> number of others, I'm sure.  One person who wrote to me privately
> certainly seems to be of this view.

I do not hate what in Jimbo's opinion defines Wikipedia, nor am I trying to
weaken or eliminate it. Larry's assertion that I want to weaken the nonbias
policy radically is a gross and unfortunate misinterpretation.

Yes, I think banning people is bad. But it may help the situation since
everyone needs to take a few steps back and relax, Lir especially. Since I
trust that Jimbo isn't happy and self-satisfied about banning Lir, I'm not
overly upset. What we *don't* need is people like Clutch being juvenile with
Lir's userpage, because public shaming in this manner isn't really the right
tactic to handle someone like Lir.

In other words, it's not people making wrong or somewhat harmful decisions
that upsets me--we all do that, and often necessarily. It's people taking
pleasure from making those kinds of decisions.

Or to use analogy: I think prisons are dehumanizing institutions that harm
society by their mere existence. That does not mean that I think that
everyone in prison should be released, and that we should dismantle our
criminal justice system. I do think that it means that we should spend more
money on education and civic empowerment than on building jails, and that we
should not criminalize homeless, etc. In other words, try to change society
so that prisons are needed as little as possible.

But as Mr. Sanger has said, the record exists, and people can derive their
own interpretation as they wish.