Brianna Laugher wrote:
On 15/06/06, John Pozniak gentgeen@yahoo.com wrote:
I agree. Unless this user was blocked from all Wikimedia projects by the board, a block on one project shouldn't mean a block on all. After all, we have very few enforced policies, and one of them is "Wikibooks is not Wikipedia".
Just an observation from a relative wikibooks-newbie, there seems to be a pretty hostile attitude to Wikipedia. Don't you trust the Wikipedia community to make the right decision?
Not for wikibooks. They have a huge user base and edit wars and wheel wars are common. A common tactic built into the site unfortunately from the start was "label and lynch". If someone wants to bail out of that environment in the middle of a conflict it is beneficial to everyone to allow them to behave civilly relative to the new environment. The controversy goes away. If we allow following between sites which are inevitably starting to drift slightly in cultural matters and operational methods then we have to deal with all of these other projects hassles. Some of which for us would not be hassles if people were simply left alone to start over in a new community with a different purpose.
Consider a troll who insists on inserting too much information for an encyclopedia but when shows up here is creating useful content and working well with others the enhance the collective output.
We do not want to take this resolved situation and relaunch into a multisite troll war. Let sleeping dogs lie, maybe they will stay asleep.
Coming from Commons...if a user was blocked in another project for copyright violations, I would be very prepared to block them if they did the same thing there. If an image was deleted in a project for having no source/being a copyright violation, I would trust that project's decision and delete it on Commons too, if there was no new compelling evidence.
If you do this at a site where I am a regular I would probably conclude you are the problem.
So now you and I have a problem.
You and the "troll" relative to the other site have a problem.
We, you and me, are sucked into the original "troll" and the other person from the other site who followed or stalked (see wiki stalking at Wikipedia, it is frowned on to follow people between topics or group clusters at Wikipedia, they would rather have the problem go away if it will than waste time escalating it and involving a bunch of new people) the alleged troll who is undoubtedly presenting themselves as the persecuted to our new site here.
See how it can escalate?
But copyright is a different issue to what is essentially being blocked for social reasons (trolling)...OK it's probably not appropriate to just automatically block anyone who has blocked elsewhere. But don't you think it might be useful to find out why they were blocked elsewhere? If you could save yourselves a lot of potential hassle (some vandals are extremely disruptive), wouldn't you consider it at least? I mean it's not like Wikipedia is this totally separate thing and they're all strangers, that's all.
It is my conclusion that it would be more work sorting out conflicting claims on the other site where I may be a complete stranger to their ways and certainly do not have the historical data to figure what the real problems might be.
Take a look at the Arbcom proceedings sometime. You might be amazed at the level of effort that goes into attempting to treat people in controversal conflicts fairly. I was amazed and impressed at the level of effort that was going into being fair and effective and resolving controversy somehow and taking responsibily for mandate resolution methods to the parties.
As Wikibooks continues to grow in content and size of community and volume of casual users and vandals or trolls it may or may not need to emulate the Arbcom. Keep your fingers crossed.
regards, lazyquasar