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steve v wrote:
[Re. The Committee's decision on Skyring]
Is "no wiki-stalking" even a policy? Cause thats what people seem to do all around anyway. Skyring seems to have a basis for some review of the latest ruling, though I suppose people will want him to demonstrate patience and heed to the rules. (In spite of WP:IAR, no doubt). Was something else going on there, or did he just kind of rub people the wrong way by being a pov-pushing smart alec?
All appeals of Arbitration Committee rulings are to be directed to Jimbo. This is made quite clear. :-) In this particular case, as can be seen from its page, Jimbo was the one who asked us to review the case in the first place in view of Skyring's highly disruptive and unhelpful behaviour.
BTW, I'm troubled by your suggestion that we are harsh. This suggests, amongst other points, two things: firstly, that we're here to meet out justice, and secondly that we're here to do so fairly. Neither of these are true. The Committee is charged with maintaining the project and protecting it from disruption with the means at its disposal. We are not, have never been, and will never be here to punish people for things they do on the wiki. Instead, we look at things from the perspective of what is best for the project.
In this case we decided that Skyring's continued presence was not only not conducive to the construction of an encyclopædia, but actively harmful, distracting worthwhile editors from actually writing and maintaining it. As such, we banned him. It is not and should not be thought of as a judgement on him personally, merely on his behaviour on the project as shewn in evidence before the Committee.
In case anyone's wondering, we banned Skyring for a year rather than permanently because we have a (non-binding) informal agreement to only ban people for a maximum of a year, 12 months being such a very long time on the Internet. If someone comes back after a year and is /still/ disruptive to the project, it is no great issue for us to re-ban them for a year (as, indeed, we have now had to do, sadly).
If you think that people do "wikistalking" to the detriment of the project, please bring them before the Arbitration Committee. It's what we're here for, but we can't be everywhere and rely on editors concerned with the project over petty recriminations to point out to us where our oversight may be required.
Hmm. Sorry that this has turned into such a screed. Hopefully some will read it and remember what we're all about: building and maintaining the best encyclopædia we possibly can.
Yours sincerely, - -- James D. Forrester Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] E-Mail : james@jdforrester.org IM (MSN) : jamesdforrester@hotmail.com