on 4/1/07 10:09 AM, Andrew Gray at shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 01/04/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 4/1/07 1:42 AM, Andries Krugers Dagneaux at andrieskd@chello.nl wrote:
That is untrue. One of the working principles of the arbcom is that it does not want to be fair to editors, but to make decisions that will help the project.
What does this mean exactly?
A clearer-than-it-would-be example: imagine there is a good-faith contributor who just causes unbelivable amounts of strife. They mean well, they make good-faith contributions, they haven't done anything *wrong* per se... but the community gets in vast lengthy wasteful fights with them over things, huge amounts of effort are wasted looking after them and cleaning up after them and trying to calm down the arguments and so on and so forth.
Do you feel we should - a) ban or restrict that user and let people get on with their work; or b) some other remedy which essentially maintains the status quo?
a) is probably more beneficial to the project, whilst b) is undeniably more fair to the user. Both are defensible solutions, but hopefully you can see the difference in the principles underlying each...
[I don't follow arbcom; I don't know if there have been arb bans on the basis of They Just Waste Too Much Time. There have been community bans to that extent, however...]
Andrew,
Thanks for this very clear explanation. As for me, I would go with solution a) for a period of time, while - and this is the important part - working with and trying to help this contributor understand the problems they are causing. That, to me, would be a solution fair to both the contributor and the project.
Marc