On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 09:17:17 -0500, "Alec Conroy" alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
Ahh, but the specific ban isn't the problem. I haven't seen a ban yet I disagreed with. It's a weapon of last resort, and so far, ever single instance I've investigated, the ban was deserved and inevitable.
And I have to say a certain amount of "argue first, then investigate" was evident in your handling of one dispute :-)
The problem is-- we don't leave it at that. But when we ban somebody, we don't let them go-- we let their ghost haunt the project. We let the spectre banned users continue to disrupt our community and divide us long after that specific user has left the project. So hurt and shattered our we by our experiences with the banned, we continue to push against them even after they have themselves been banned.
This is simply not true. The only time this happens is when *they* insist on not letting it lie. Do you consider that we are to blame for JB196's 500+ sockpuppets? Only in the sense that "if you don't do as I say I will kill the kitten, and it will be YOUR fault!"
How many times have I seen "This change was supported by <Enemy of the Project _____>." as a justification to revert good-faith users in a content dispute. How many times have I hard "You're probably in league with <Enemy of the Project ____>" slung as a personal attack without one shred of evidence? How many times do the names of the Enemies of the Project get mentioned to support some argument?
I have no idea. How many times have you heard it? And how many of those times were from people who mattered in circumstances that mattered?
The banned are banned. Just as we shouldn't consider their view to change the encyclopedia in ways they would like, so we shouldn't use their views to justify changing the encyclopedia in ways they would dislike.
And who's suggesting we do that? Specific examples, please.
Some people-- far too many, have come to view the encyclopedia as a way to minimize the influence of the banned, rather than view banning as a tool to protect the encyclopedia. In the infamous Attack Sites case, two of our own arbitors voted that "Not mentioning the Banned Attackers" was more important than "Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia", and that mentions or links should be stricken from the encyclopedia, even at the cost to the project itself.
Who would those people be? Names, please. I've not come across anyone who thinks that not mentioning banned people is more important than the encyclopaedia. Of course, if you represent linking to a hate site as being crucial to the integrity of the project then it might *seem* as if that's the case, but most of us are, I hope, a good deal more pragmatic than that.
No one's weeping over the banned. What we fear is that these attackers, by inspiring such hatred, may be able to do more damage to the encyclopedia AFTER they are banned, through the mere mention of their name, than they ever could have done as unbanned users.
And this is precisely what I've been saying. We need to disengage. And that includes not actively participating in sites that engage in and support harassment, or with people on those sites who perpetrate that harassment. Alkivar fell for this, with disastrous consequences. Another example was closed on the noticeboards only today.
There is a huge tension here between not wanting to engage in drama, and not wanting to suppress dissent. We are extraordinarily tolerant of dissent. The ANI thread repeating Kohs' mad theory about Jehochman and Durova was prolonged by editors in good standing, but when you pick away at it, the vast majority of the heat turns out to have been injected by sockpuppets and IPs editing through open proxies. Was reverting the closure of that debate a smart move, or a dumb move? I think it was dumb, because the accusations had no merit and no source, other than allegations made by a banned user. That's what banned users are doing *right now* - they are trying very hard to poison our culture, and weaken the fairly weak structures we have in place to prevent anarchy and focus on the core goals of NPOV and verifiability.
Guy (JzG)