on 2/22/07 2:07 PM, David Gerard at dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Put it this way: more than me has thought he's more than one of the recent posters with a remarkably low evidence:invective ratio.
The poster in question is no longer completely useless to the list. I think we're slowly training him to write things that are relevant talking points concerning the project.
I fear that's all we can really do. The fundamental problem is that, as long as email addresses are free, it's impossible to keep someone entirely off the list without getting really drastic and screening just about all messages. And that would in fact make a conceptually-moderated list, which would be a failure as a list. wikien-l has to be open, as Wikipedia has to be open.
Heck, I don't want that job as a listmod. I just want to clear the spam and help people who can't work the Mailman interface and so forth, and boot out troublemakers only as needed.
As the mailing list for a wiki, readers have to have some of the tolerance to stupidity they need to have to work on the wiki itself. Just as working productively with *complete idiots* is pretty much mandatory on the wiki, putting up with this shit to some degree is hard to avoid here.
David,
Extremely well put! You helped me a great deal when I first came to the List. It was my first experience posting to any such list, and I didn't even know where to place, or how to format, my messages. Now, to some people's annoyance, I can focus on the substance ;-). You are a part of the chemo that will hold back the cancer in the culture.
Marc Riddell