I think that Erik's suggestions here have great merit, and I'd like to open the floor to a discussion. Obviously, he's given a fair amount of detail, and I may not want to adopt all of the detail that he's suggested, but I think in broad outline we're going to have to move to something like this.
--Jimbo
Erik Moeller wrote:
Jimmy-
It seems likely that he's angry enough to never come back anyway, in which case we can all just talk about how to best avoid this sort of thing in the future.
Ban faster? :-)
Seriously, I don't see how you can avoid dealing with problematic persons, and I don't see how the persons attacked by RK should have acted any differently, and I still think that a temporary ban was the best action in this case. There are some people who believe that I am somehow working on a grand strategy to usurp power on Wikipedia, which is kind of funny, because the first thing I would do it if I had it is democratize everything ;-).
We should avoid developing too much of a behavioral double standard. RK was tolerated because he contributed good material. But how much good material has not been contributed because of his well documented behavioral problems? In my opinion, we need to set clearer rules on Wikiquette and be serious about enforcing them, with a well-defined protocol of warning, temporary banning, permanent banning etc. Maybe there could be a 5-10 member Wikiquette "committee" where violations could be reported and decisions would be made by voting. By making it proprietary (totally unwiki, but so is reporting directly to you) we can avoid having the lists and talk pages cluttered up with these complaints and can make sure that users will not have to fear repercussions for reporting Wikiquette violations.
Implementation wise, this could be a mailing list with non-member posting rights (perhaps with a web-based submission interface to avoid spam -- this could actually be done inside Wikipedia by creating a fake user with that email address and using the "Email this user" feature, how about [[User:Mediator]]?). Right now, it's really difficult for users to deal with insults and personal attacks. I would love to be able to say in 5-10 years that the discussion climate on Wikipedia is the best anywhere on the Internet.
Regards,
Erik _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l