I am not going to justify protecting the page. Rather, I will relate my perspective as to what happened.
In the morning, there was an email to the list saying that 172 has returned and that we should be wary of his edits. Upon opening Wikipedia, I saw that he had just removed chunks of text from the Mugabe article. His edits were clearly POV. For example, the article said that he had killed political opponents, and he changed "killed" to "suppressed." I reverted that (and this was the source of my comment "Call a spade a spade.") He also removed any text that was critical of Mugabe. I restored the text, and he removed it again. This seesawing went on for quite some time, with him commenting that the text wasn't worthwhile. (The history shows this). Rather than spend another hour reverting back and forth, I protected the page and informed the list. It was immediately unprotected, and 172 began making charges of imperialism, etc. and saying that the criticisms of Mugabe were unfounded and should be removed. He also began adding text to the article, which Eric Moller pointed out was plagiarized. As the morning progressed, Eric, Jtdirl, and myself were going back and forth restoring texts that 172 decided to delete because they did not meet his POV. The whole thing went on for over four hours.
I am not justifying the original block. I simply regarded it as a way of stopping a form of vandalism--and yes, I believe that forcing POV on an article and erasing text because it does not conform to a particular POV is a form of vandalism. I also added material to counter claims that 172 made. Frankly, I don't care if they are in or not. I do, however, have a problem with taking an individual who is obviously controversial and removing all material that sheds light on the background to the controversy. I also have a problem with plagiarism, and expect more from someone who claims to have a PhD in history with a field of specialization in that field.
Danny
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 01:05:31PM -0500, daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
I am not justifying the original block. I simply regarded it as a way of stopping a form of vandalism--and yes, I believe that forcing POV on an article and erasing text because it does not conform to a particular POV is a form of vandalism.
I think we should not extend the term 'vandalism' in this way. It makes communication more difficult.
There is a distinction to be made between destructive edits that don't make any pretence to be encyclopedic, and ones which do. This distinction is a very useful one, because edits of the first type are not controversial, while edits of the second type sometimes are.
We have a consensus that repeated 'vandalism' can be a reason to protect a page, and indeed that 'vandals' should be banned.
When this consensus was reached, the word 'vandal' was being used to describe people like fartboy, not people who write only their own point of view, or remove others' points of view while they edit articles, though we have always had visits from both kinds of people.
Now, if we want to decide that some forms of edit of the second type should also be a general cause for protecting pages, banning, or whatever, this list is certainly an appropriate place to discuss it.
But it is better to say 'such and such a behaviour is sufficiently bad that we should protect pages when it occurs', than to try to redefine 'vandalism' and then say 'but see, we already know how to deal with vandals'.
-M-
I am not going to justify protecting the page. Rather, I will relate my perspective as to what happened.
Danny,
your description of 172's behavior is correct, and it took much patience to get him to accept a compromise. Regardless, we need to maintain the sysop/editor distinction -- protecting pages should only be done
1) in cases of obvious vandalism, 2) in an edit war, by an *impartial* third party.
It's similar to page deletion: Sysops are supposed to put pages that they want deleted (except vandalism) on the "Votes for deletion" page and let someone else flush them. A sysop in an edit war should contact another sysop and ask them to protect the page, as a time out measure for all parties involved.
For the two of us, it is obvious that 172 behaved incorrectly, but for an outsider, it may look like an abuse of power. That's why we need to maintain a process that minimizes the potential for such abuse.
Regards,
Erik