On 10/09/2007, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/10/07, Armed Blowfish diodontida.armata@googlemail.com wrote:
On 10/09/2007, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Not necessarily, but unless our ban of them was mistaken, there was a reason to ban them. This was generally connected to their behavior on the project.
Do you really see people in such black-and-white terms?
Not entirely; however, I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people banned have been banned for good reason. There may be some edge cases; I'd submit that in the vast majority even of those, keeping the record available is beneficial, in that it can help explain what happened and perhaps why. Some people have been banned unjustly, I'm sure, but comparatively few: of these, the vast majority (unfortunately) are newbie-biting, and in most of those cases, there is little on-wiki history to erase in any case.
Can you conceive of circumstances in which someone might be a detriment to the project without being an evil person who needs to suffer, or should I start listing hypothetical examples?
Also, something can be public without being indexed by Google.
Besides, if Wikipaedia is the only source of certain negative information on these people, and Wikipaedia is not a reliable source, then why are negative Wikipaedia pages still the #1 Google hits for some of these people years after the fact? BLP applied to all namespaces, last I checked.
It's also generally the case, I've found, that the banned people making a big fuss about this are the ones for whom their history is deeply unflattering to them, and for good reason; they actually did behave badly.
-Matt
'Behave badly' is rather broad. Who hasn't? Let's see... very very small children.
But anyway, have you noticed how people, often banned people, who feel hurt by Wikipaedia tend to start 'behaving badly' *as a reaction* to getting hurt by Wikipaedia?