[WikiEN-l] Featured editors?

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan at tobias.name>:
>
> While the trolls and vandals do some harm, a lot more harm is done to
> Wikipedia, in my opinion, by the Judge Dredd types who see themselves
> as the thin blue line against trolling, vandalism, and anarchy, and
> have no compunctions against acting as judge, jury, and executioner
> against anybody they see as an enemy, or as somebody aiding the
> enemy.
>
> Human history is full of cases where people decided that some enemy
> (real or imagined, significant or exaggerated) justified a state of
> war in which normal civilized, genteel considerations no longer
> applied.  The results, which include the Spanish Inquisition, the
> Salem Witch Trials, and McCarthyism, are often judged harshly by
> later historians.  In the throes of a moral panic, people can enter a
> state of hysteria where they undermine the values that made their
> community good in the course of allegedly defending it, like the
> soldiers who destroyed a village in order to save it.  A Twilight
> Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", provides a
> fictional illustration of the tendency of a community to be its own
> worst enemy.

There are many problems with the above. First, we are the thin blue 
line against
trolling, vandalism and anarchy. There are masses of people who want nothing
more than to use Wikipedia to promote their agends and goals. And we 
cannot let
that occur. There isn't much of an issue here of a moral panic. The people we
are dealing with, such as Brandt, Bagley and Barber will stop at nothing until
they get precisely what they want out of Wikipedia or destroy the project.
There is no acceptable response other than to block them on sight.

Although I disagree with Guy as to how we should treat people who are 
willing to
deal with them, it is posts like the above that make me have some 
sympathy with
Guy's position. Spend too much time on WR and you'll forget what these people
have tried to do to Wikipedia and the lives they've ruined in the process. And
frankly, to compare good faith attempts to keep this project safe from the
people who have explicitly stated they intend to harm to the Inquisition
demonstrates a lack of perspective at many different levels starting with the
minor detail that we're not killing anyone.