On 2/9/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
That seems a false distinction to me---you're defining "provocation" as "stating who they are", but only for certain classes of users (saying you're a Satanist, Republican, or gay is ok, saying you're a neo-Nazi isn't).
Sadly, I think the only fair way to treat these is retrospectively - to see if the "provocative" statements actually provoked anyone. With the pedophilia template this was clearly the case.
Note that I'm only talking about justifying blocking someone - a general rule against offensive material on user pages would be a good thing.
Also to clarify for Sarah, my original point in starting this thread was not so much to question whether or not we had blocked inappropriately, but to take stock, and hopefully define once and for all that we do not condone blocking people for who they are or what they believe, no matter how offensive we find it. We only block for actions that harm Wikipedia in some way. I do accept though that blocking someone for an offensive template is a bit of a grey area - is it blocking them for *being*, or for *doing*?
Steve