Jimbo wrote: "Actually, of course, we have huge volumes of guidelines, all carefully discussed and debated, and we have institutional mechanisms set up to deal with such things, right?
What do you mean when we say we have "no guidelines against users who are out to disrupt things"?"
We have policies against the most disruptive things a user can do. There are plenty of ways to disrupt Wikipedia without violating written policies. (Emphasis on "written"). We also have plenty of users who go right up to the edge of what is acceptable behavior, and admins are helpless to use common sense and ban these users for fear of acting "unilaterally" or being accused of abusing their powers. The institutional mechanisms (the arbcom, for example) are crowded out by cases that any admin with a modicum of common sense could have dealt with in 5 minutes. The "hard" cases, where the issues aren't so clear-cut, get ignored so that the most blatant cases can be adjudicated.
--Mark