I don't think we should make a formal distinction between launching personal attacks on wikipedians
and speaking about destroying wikipedia on wikipedia talk pages and doing so offsite. We have acted
in the past in the case of VfDs when proponents or opponents go onto offsite message boards to
recruit people to vote one way or another. If we were to be formalistic and say that nothing that
happens off of wikipedia should impact on our decisions we will make it much more difficult to
maintain the encyclopedia.
Yes, Amalekite has said on Stormfront that their intent is to promote a Nazi POV in his editing but until
he explicitly says so on a wikipedia talk page we have to wait before we act? Should we wait weeks for
a pattern to develop when we have evidence offsite of what Amalekite is trying to do? Why should we
restrict our survey of the evidence in this way?
> We could ban him then. Is there any particular hurry?
> Why don't we
> wait until he does something wrong and then ban him?
This isn't just one lone wacko. It's an attempt to organize a large scale attack on wikipedia. We can
wait for weeks or months until each and every one of these neo-Nazis has established a pattern of
behaviour, but by then we'll have dozens, or even more than a hundred, cases to deal with. If you read
what Amalekite is saying on Stormfront it is clear he is instructing neo-Nazis in how to "play the game"
in order to draw things out as long as possible and do as much damage as possible. There's no need
for us to work according to his needs and play the game he wants us to play.
Amalekite has made his intentions explictly clear. We'd be fools to pretend we don't know what we
know and not act on it just because he stated his intentions on Stormfront instead of on a wikipedia
Talk page.
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