[WikiEN-l] Fairness in Wikipedia

[Marc Riddell]

on 4/1/07 10:09 AM, Andrew Gray at shimgray at gmail.com wrote:

> On 01/04/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> on 4/1/07 1:42 AM, Andries Krugers Dagneaux at andrieskd at chello.nl wrote:
>> 
>>> That is untrue. One of the working principles of the arbcom is that it
>>> does not want to be fair to editors, but to make decisions that will
>>> help the project.
>> 
>> What does this mean exactly?
> 
> A clearer-than-it-would-be example: imagine there is a good-faith
> contributor who just causes unbelivable amounts of strife. They mean
> well, they make good-faith contributions, they haven't done anything
> *wrong* per se... but the community gets in vast lengthy wasteful
> fights with them over things, huge amounts of effort are wasted
> looking after them and cleaning up after them and trying to calm down
> the arguments and so on and so forth.
> 
> Do you feel we should - a) ban or restrict that user and let people
> get on with their work; or b) some other remedy which essentially
> maintains the status quo?
> 
> a) is probably more beneficial to the project, whilst b) is undeniably
> more fair to the user. Both are defensible solutions, but hopefully
> you can see the difference in the principles underlying each...
> 
> [I don't follow arbcom; I don't know if there have been arb bans on
> the basis of They Just Waste Too Much Time. There have been community
> bans to that extent, however...]

Andrew,

Thanks for this very clear explanation. As for me, I would go with solution
a) for a period of time, while - and this is the important part - working
with and trying to help this contributor understand the problems they are
causing. That, to me, would be a solution fair to both the contributor and
the project.

Marc


-- 
* Practice random acts of kindness. *

* Practice random acts of tolerance. *