On 1/29/03 9:23 AM, "Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)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.