[WikiEN-l] drama and incivility

[Monahon, Peter B.]

> Earlier: ... When there is noise on a 
> discussion list, the list itself suffers.  
> Not just the people who have to read it ...

Peter Blaise responds:  

I hear your pain.  I do not, however, want a moderator to act on your
pain as their reason to express banning powers over other wiki or list
members.  I've not seen positive results from expecting moderators to
relieve other people's personal sense of suffering by banning.  I have
seen such powers directly cause damage to other members of the
community, such as banning alternative sharing styles because the
moderator or another member felt uncomfortable.  

Instead, I suggest scrolling past any content we're not interested in,
and not commenting on the content of such posts that do not interest us.


Moderators and members alike can contact the authors of what they may
think are offensive posts, and try to resolve the problem with the
author on or off wiki/list.  If this takes three days or three years to
resolve the misunderstanding ... then either don't do it, and don't
complain to others ... or do it, and don't complain to others.  Either
way, the common denominator is: don't complain to others!

I suggest not banning anyone.  Delete spam and vandalism, but since they
usually move on from an email or IP, banning spammers and vandals just
wastes admin time and system resources by keeping a list of dead emails
and IPs.  

In other posts, I share other reasons to prohibit admins from having
banning powers.

-- Peter Blaise