On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:28:23 -0500, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
What we are fighting here is the perception -- rightly or wrongly held, but by nontrivial numbers of people -- that Wikipedia has a tendency to engage in suppressive and outright repressive ways towards some of its critics and towards some viewpoints that it doesn't like to hear.
Yes I agree that this is what we are fighting. I happen to think that as a perception it is deeply flawed. We are extremely tolerant of criticism. What we should not tolerate is people with a grudge harassing those who defend our core principles.
Some of the people who see us as suppressive are on record as believing that the publishing and republishing of baseless conspiracy theories designed to harass Wikipedia users is no bog deal. I happen to think that is wrong.
The idea that Wikipedia is suppressive seems bizarre to me. The banned users who cause most of the drama have worked long and hard to ensure that they are not welcome, and being constantly reminded that they are *still* asserting that the problem is *everybody else* is simply tiresome.
The way to make that perception go away is not to twist and turn and find increasingly-tenuous ways of justifying the allegedly- repressive behavior as being something other than it appeared to be, or unfortunate but really necessary, or not so bad after all, or ancient history that nobody should need to worry about any more. The way to make that perception go away is to *stop doing the things that give rise to it*. And if we believe that the perception matters, we have to stop doing the things regardless of whether the perceptions are rightly held or not.
But it is necessary. It is necessary, in order to create a safe editing environment, that we do not allow people to harass our users, including by bringing external harassment to Wikipedia.
People differ on how best to achieve that, but I don't see any meaningful number of people who believe that linking off-wiki harassment is in any way desirable.
Guy (JzG)