On 1/29/03 9:23 AM, "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:
You cut off the section of my proposal that after some number of people commit the ostracism the username has to be changed. I.e. this is a voting mechanism, ala Erik. Please don't attack my proposal for faults it doesn't have.
I honestly don't think this is convoluted at all. Perhaps I did not explain it clearly.
O.k., it makes more sense now. I thought that the voting part was a concession you were making, rather than a central part of the proposal.
Stepping back from this particular issue, I'm a bit surprised here that you seem to favor some kind of voting or formalization. I would have intuitively guessed that you'd be opposed. I am guessing that you _do_ think that there are dangers to voting mechanisms, particularly if they can be abused to carry out agendas for which they were not originally designed.
I believe in "vote with your feet" mechanisms, rather than "go to the polls to select from a ticket" mechanisms. Vote with your feet mechanisms allow for everyone to be individually satisfied until a critical mass
In this case, any formal process would have to be somehow insulated from being a mechanism for a determined group to hassle people of a different political viewpoint, with an eye toward politicizing some entry or set of entries. At least some simple rules are dangerous in that regard.
Yes.
For example "If three people say your name is offensive, then you have to change it". Will libertarians use this to harass a socialist? Will Greens use this to harass a free market environmentalist?
I think the number of people finding a name offensive to instigate an automatic change would have to be considerably higher. Also, my mechanism would trigger a warning first, which would allow that user time to make his case etc.
I'm not saying that all formalization leads to bad outcomes! I'm just saying that one benefit of an informal approach is that it can be flexible and is harder to abuse.
Well, open to abuse in very different ways. However, if we've got you as benevolent dictator on this issue, then we can take advantage of that: instead of there being some automatic cut-off, there would just be a page listing the offensive names and their ranking (preferably viewable only by you) that you could act upon using your judgment.