Delirium wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
Thirdly, sentences should be much, much harsher.
Ban them for life and
get it over with. Banning only slows them down anyway, most of them
will come back under a different name. But at least the community will
be able to unite behind the AC ruling.
I think the problem with this is that, if the community had its way, a
lot of the best contributors would be banned if they were unpopular. A
site in which all unpopular users are banned is not really a wiki. I'm
personally quite glad that Wik was not banned the numerous times his
case was brought up (until the last time, of course), and wouldn't want
things to work otherwise.
Perhaps you have a different type of site in mind?
I don't really want to diverge into a dicussion of the personality
traits of particular users, but Wik was more than just unpopular. He
refused discussion and conducted numerous edit wars. According to this
mailing list post:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-May/027321.html
he was responsible for the departure of at least two users.
There are more important things than the number of words written on
Wikipedia. It also matters that the text written is accurate and written
in a neutral point of view. NPOV is acheived through rational discussion
and compromise, two things that Wik was extremely bad at.
Another thing that is more important than word count is the mental
health of our contributors. Editors should be able to contribute to the
site without constant anger and frustration. They shouldn't have to put
up with personal attacks.
Wik's point of view was more important to him than the integrity of
Wikipedia. This was demonstrated by the fact that when he was finally
frustrated, he wrote a script to vandalise Wikipedia and meta. He spent
about a week in an arms race with me and the other developers.
I'm thinking of a site where NPOV is valued, rather than just word
count. If that's different to the type of site you're thinking of, then
so be it.
-- Tim Starling