The faster (and harder) you go the easier it is to make serious mistakes (and do real damage to the community). Things just aren't always what they seem at first impression.
Fred
From: "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 03:07:30 -0800 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Registration system and blocks
- ArbCom is afraid of backlash for dealing rapidly with clear abuses.
I feel like this may be the most likely problem. I also think it could be worked through simply by biting the bullet and coming down hard and fast on a few exceptional problem cases, making Wikipedians get used to the fact that "due process" doesn't mean "any process that makes it harder to ban someone". (I think this is an artifact of a time when Wikipedia was much smaller you held sole power to ban and did everything you could to avoid it. A benevolent dictator presiding over a medium-sized project is markedly different from a pseudo-democratic body presiding over one of the largest "open source" projects in the world with one of the lowest barriers to entry. I don't think enough people have grasped that.)
I think this is basically accurate. I do recommend, though, that the "coming down hard and fast" be really limited to a few exceptional problem cases, as opposed to being random.