On 10/2/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
You're right, we can't stop bad people from being bad, but that doesn't mean that we can't keep employ measures to encourage the honest people to stay honest.
Or are you also opposed to doors that lock? ... with the exception of high security doors, a locked door actually does fairly little to prevent a determined attacker from getting inside, and yet locked doors have been demonstrated over and over again to be effective.
Or another way of looking at it: One of the more clearly stated arguments against us running advertising on Wikipedia ourselves is the potential creation of bias, or at least the creation of the appearance of bias. It strikes me as odd that people will scream so loudly against the introduction of advertising which would bring us lots of useful money without a definite introduction of bias, and yet folks are not willing to take maximal measures against the abuse of Wikipedia as an astroturfed advertising medium... when the latter does create a clear bias in our content.
Sorry if I *do* contradict you. You are one of the most reasonable people on wikipedia, so I would hope that you would take my contradiction of what you said above in the same spirit. I wish to reason with the unreasonable statements in the paragraph above.
Advertisements are *not* useful money. They detract from our mission, and the value that is added to our content by people who do not feel advertisements are useful. I *will* argue the point if needed. But I think I have argued that already in another place.