Dan wrote:
I have a fundamental philosophical problem with extending the "banned is banned" concept to the extent that anything originating with a banned user must be suppressed from being linked, quoted, or mentioned anywhere, even by an editor in good standing. Are we really like the party of Orwell's 1984 that made disfavored people into "Unpersons", or like the Church of Scientology which has the concept of "Suppressive Persons"? Such concepts fit better with authoritarian regimes and mind-control cults than with communities devoted to gathering and sharing information.
Guy wrote:
And I have a fundamental philosophical problem with the idea that banning is "suppression", and indeed with your continued use of such loaded language to describe many attempts to create and maintain a safe environment for those editors who are, unlike banned users, prepared to work within our policy and community mores.
[...]
We don't make them unpersons, we simply tell them, regretfully but firmly, that their input is no longer welcome.
[...]
If a view is significant and mainstream then we will usually have many unbanned users prepared to advocate it in a way that satisfies policy.
Ahh, but the specific ban isn't the problem. I haven't seen a ban yet I disagreed with. It's a weapon of last resort, and so far, ever single instance I've investigated, the ban was deserved and inevitable.
The problem is-- we don't leave it at that. But when we ban somebody, we don't let them go-- we let their ghost haunt the project. We let the spectre banned users continue to disrupt our community and divide us long after that specific user has left the project. So hurt and shattered our we by our experiences with the banned, we continue to push against them even after they have themselves been banned.
How many times have I seen "This change was supported by <Enemy of the Project _____>." as a justification to revert good-faith users in a content dispute. How many times have I hard "You're probably in league with <Enemy of the Project ____>" slung as a personal attack without one shred of evidence? How many times do the names of the Enemies of the Project get mentioned to support some argument?
The banned are banned. Just as we shouldn't consider their view to change the encyclopedia in ways they would like, so we shouldn't use their views to justify changing the encyclopedia in ways they would dislike.
Some people-- far too many, have come to view the encyclopedia as a way to minimize the influence of the banned, rather than view banning as a tool to protect the encyclopedia. In the infamous Attack Sites case, two of our own arbitors voted that "Not mentioning the Banned Attackers" was more important than "Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia", and that mentions or links should be stricken from the encyclopedia, even at the cost to the project itself.
No one's weeping over the banned. What we fear is that these attackers, by inspiring such hatred, may be able to do more damage to the encyclopedia AFTER they are banned, through the mere mention of their name, than they ever could have done as unbanned users.
Criminals are criminals-- they'll be handled by the police, and little we can do to add or detract. And trolls are trolls. They'll be blocked, they'll be banned, they'll be reverted, and the project will survive. I don't actively fear either of criminals nor trolls destroying the project-- all they can do is slow us down.
But statement like: "This user edited in a way that supported an Enemy of the Project" "This user inserted a link to an Enemy of the Project" "Oh, but aren't you friends with Enemy of the Project".
These ARE dangerous. Left unchecked, these could be our undoing.
Alec