On 5/16/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I think a fair number of people need to be kicked out of the project just for being lousy writers. (This is not a policy statement, just a statement of attitude and frustration.)
I realize it's written out of frustration, but you really have to appreciate much more how difficult it is to "kick out" people. You do know that Lir is still around, right? How many times did we block the guy? The fact that problem users become invisible in terms of traceable identities doesn't make them go away. It makes the problem worse. And you also remember User:Michael, I'm sure. I think that experiment is generally considered to be successful?
Wikipedia is an open system. Creating a new account is trivial; so is circumventing a block. For most people who have dynamic IPs, it doesn't even take any effort other than waiting a few hours. Heck, we don't even _require_ people to register, and when they do, we don't require email address confirmation (which itself is trivial to circumvent - mailinator.net, etc.).
Unless we want to radically reduce that level of openness, we need to stick to our usual patience in dealing with problem users. Otherwise we risk to turning an incompetent good faith editor into a malicious sock puppetteer. The fact that we have all these complex processes and policies - RfC, ArbCom, mediation, etc. - makes it all work.
That doesn't mean that we can't do more. We should make better use of the key advantage we get from _not_ blocking problem users and bad writers: traceability. There's nothing wrong with telling someone: "We appreciate your contributions, but their quality is not yet up to our standards, so we're going to put you in a different class of users."
Highlight their edits. Create a page where volunteers can sign up as mentors to deal with them. Only in the worst cases, tell them that if they don't find someone to mentor, they will be blocked. And I probably should polish my "School of Wikipedia" idea a bit more. Writing is a skill that can be acquired.
Erik