On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:33:48 +0800, "John Lee" johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Since it takes many voices to reach a new consensus, I'll just chip in my two cents and state i agree with Mgm - the banning policy exists to discourage intolerable troublemakers from editing onwiki. Once you are banned, any presumption of good faith is gone, because you need to be absolutely intolerable to be banned - that's why all your edits are reverted on sight, and only the decent ones restored. A similar presumption should exist with regard to comments by banned users on articles where they are the subject - but rather than convoluting policy and creating an exception to the general presumption of bad faith, why not just direct such users to our normal offwiki channels for subjects of articles?
Precisely. The subject in this case already has access to the back-channels, and knows how to use them. He knows full well that if he emails certain individuals with factual errors, they will be attended to.
Of course, this is mainly about Brandt. We cannot subject ordinary editors to the risk of being sucked into his cesspit. The "revert, block, ignore" model exists in part to protect the well-meaning from being sucked into long-running disputes - as we know from past experience, any comment which is even slightly critical of Brandt will result in him publishing your username and whatever personal details he can glean (and he is pretty resourceful, let's not forget) on his Hivemind pages. That is a risk to which we should not subject unwitting editors. That is why he is banned. Removing his comments is not censorship, it's protection from involvement in a particularly nasty dispute.
I am not without sympathy, he was the subject of attacks perpetrated abusively through Wikipedia, but his inability to separate the project and those who (ab)use the project for their own ends has been a very large part of his problem. In particular, it takes a very high degree of unpleasantness to overwhelm Jimbo's natural tendency to be humane in respect of biographies.
Guy (JzG)