Thank you Larry. That sums up my feelings on bans
nicely.
Stephen G.
--- Larry Sanger <lsanger(a)nupedia.com> wrote:
I would like to weigh in here to say that I'm
just
slightly disturbed that
we are getting into the habit of publicly proposing,
on this list, to use
the banning power to settle acrimonious edit wars.
I've noticed this in
the case of Lir and of DW. When Jimbo and I were
the only ones who had
the authority to ban people, we never used it for
this purpose, or at
least, I can't remember a single case. This is the
first time I recall
anyone proposing to ban someone for *one hour* so
that the person could
"cool off." This is the first I've heard of
"cooling people off" as a
reason to *ban* them for any length of time.
If I could see immediately that Lir were simply a
*vandal*, I could
understand. But I do not see that Lir is simply a
vandal, whatever
his/her merits.
Like everybody, I totally understand :-) the
frustration involved in
working with people I regard as unreasonable,
difficult, and even
trollish. But banning them isn't the way that, up
until just the last
month or two, we have dealt with them.
Let me be clear here (it's so easy to be
misunderstood): on the one hand,
I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with
outright banning an IP
number (if it's stable) or perhaps, temporarily, a
block of IP numbers, if
it's perfectly clear that the person being banned is
just a vandal. On
the other hand, I do not think we should ban people
who appear to be
making a good faith effort to contribute, unless we
have gone through a
long public process and ensured that the bar is set
very high.
In particular, we do not ban people for merely
failing to follow the
"rules," even rules like [[netiquette]]. At least
part of the point of
making the first rule "ignore all rules," I thought,
is the notion that we
all understand that we aren't going to *enforce*
these rules except in the
most egregious cases, which Lir and DW aren't, as
far as I can tell. For
non-vandals, the bar has to be set really, really
high, I think.
--Larry
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