Jonathan Wrote:
The information is not misogynistic, it is true. Labelling this person a vandal does a disservice to the Wikipedia.
The content is irrelevant here. If this is our MIT vandal, then he caused hours of work for mav and others with numerous random text deletions and malicious changes under numerous user names. Since then he has returned to make other deletions and changes, and promised to keep vandalising articles until Wikipedia is completely unusable. *That's* the vandalism in question, not the "annoying edits" on the woman page (and others).
If the information he is added is relevant, a neutral party can add it back at a later date. (I'm leaving out my own views on the information he is adding because, as I said, that's not relevant to the question of whether he should be allowed to edit here).
sannse
sannse@delphiforums.com wrote:
Jonathan Wrote:
The information is not misogynistic, it is true. Labelling this person a vandal does a disservice to the Wikipedia.
The content is irrelevant here. If this is our MIT vandal, then he caused hours of work for mav and others with numerous random text deletions and malicious changes under numerous user names.
If the information he is added is relevant, a neutral party can add it back at a later date. (I'm leaving out my own views on the information he is adding because, as I said, that's not relevant to the question of whether he should be allowed to edit here).
There's always a need to separate the writing from the person who wrote it. Just as we are not justified in claiming personal ownership to any of our contributions then similarly we are not justified in giving a vandal credit for his work. Most of what these people write is nonsense or offensive, and is justifiably deleted. If, however, in some rare instance our same vandal happened to write something meaningful and useful, there is no reason why that particular bit of writing should be deleted out of spite. Each contribution should be judged on its own merits
Eclecticology
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Most of what these people write is nonsense or offensive, and is justifiably deleted. If, however, in some rare instance our same vandal happened to write something meaningful and useful, there is no reason why that particular bit of writing should be deleted out of spite. Each contribution should be judged on its own merits
I disagree in most cases. There must be flexibility, of course. However, it is not *just* pointless and stupid for us to look at every edit of the MIT vandal and study whether it is NPOV or not. It's actually worse than that.
If we start treating him as "semi-banned", then he has strong encouragement to keep coming back. He knows that if he can write something semi-plausible, he can trick us into debating it, discussing it, and so forth. That's a big mistake.
The best way to get rid of a vandal is to simply erase everything he does immediately.
In the real world, the most effective anti-grafitti campaigns involve simply cleaning it up as fast as possible. It would only encourage it to convene artistic committees to study the artistic quality of each one to determine if it's an improvement.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Most of what these people write is nonsense or offensive, and is justifiably deleted. If, however, in some rare instance our same vandal happened to write something meaningful and useful, there is no reason why that particular bit of writing should be deleted out of spite. Each contribution should be judged on its own merits
I disagree in most cases. There must be flexibility, of course. However, it is not *just* pointless and stupid for us to look at every edit of the MIT vandal and study whether it is NPOV or not. It's actually worse than that.
If we start treating him as "semi-banned", then he has strong encouragement to keep coming back. He knows that if he can write something semi-plausible, he can trick us into debating it, discussing it, and so forth. That's a big mistake.
The best way to get rid of a vandal is to simply erase everything he does immediately.
In the real world, the most effective anti-grafitti campaigns involve simply cleaning it up as fast as possible. It would only encourage it to convene artistic committees to study the artistic quality of each one to determine if it's an improvement.
This is really just a difference in perspective. Whereas I was approaching this from the perspective of the article, it appears that you are appraoching it from the perspective of the contributing vandal. Of course it's ridiculous to try to imagine someone as "semi-banned". Once he's banned, that's it. It's pointless to speculate about what he might have done if he were allowed to continue.
If the comment that women are more prone to anorexia were added to an article where it at least has a modicum of relevance, a person watching this article who otherwise might not have crossed paths with our vandal could easily see the unexplained removal of that comment as being itself vandalism.
Eclecticology
Ray Saintonge wrote:
This is really just a difference in perspective. Whereas I was approaching this from the perspective of the article, it appears that you are appraoching it from the perspective of the contributing vandal.
That's right. Different cases may differ. In this particular case, this is a known person who has repeatedly threatened to vandalize wikipedia by making subtle edits over a long period of time. This is a person who caused several people to work overnight to revert a series of edits from a series of different ip numbers and login ids.
If the comment that women are more prone to anorexia were added to an article where it at least has a modicum of relevance, a person watching this article who otherwise might not have crossed paths with our vandal could easily see the unexplained removal of that comment as being itself vandalism.
That's right. We should probably annotate such removals.
Also, it's important to realize that some vandalism may be driven by a lack of balance in an article in the first place. In other words, as unfortunate as it may be, sometimes some vandals may have "a point" and choose to react to it by going bonkers.
In such cases, the article should be improved, even if by accident the improvements make the vandal happy! :-)
--Jimbo
I was hoping we'd have this conversation on the mentioned talk pages and not on this list.
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88
sannse@delphiforums.com wrote:
The information is not misogynistic, it is true. Labelling this person a vandal does a disservice to the Wikipedia.
The content is irrelevant here. If this is our MIT vandal, then he caused hours of work for mav and others with numerous random text deletions and malicious changes under numerous user names. Since then he has returned to make other deletions and changes, and promised to keep vandalising articles until Wikipedia is completely unusable. *That's* the vandalism in question, not the "annoying edits" on the woman page (and others).
Absolutely! Well said.
This is a true simple vandal with a track record. He's banned from wikipedia, and that's that. We must not encourage him by considering each of his edits independently. Anything he writes should be reverted instantly, and his username vaporized as fast as possible.
And we should keep logs so that we can track him down and report him.
(He's at Harvard now, not MIT.)
If the information he is added is relevant, a neutral party can add it back at a later date. (I'm leaving out my own views on the information he is adding because, as I said, that's not relevant to the question of whether he should be allowed to edit here).
That's right, 100%. His stuff *is* bad, but at this point it's irrelevant to debate the details.
--Jimbo