James Rosenzweig wrote: Sorry but that link is not to en existing page. Ec

James Rosenzweig wrote: I consider such decisions to remain firmly within my range of discretion, so any such vote would necessarily just be a poll of community opinion, which is of course always a valid thing to do. As it stands, it seems that community opinion is, as always, firmly in favor of openness, a position which I wholeheartedly endorse. I *do* think there is a serious problem which needs to be addressed, and I actually agree with Adam Carr's comment that "Unless Wikipedia takes some policy initiative such as this, it will not only be unable to achieve its objectives, it will begin to deteriorate in quality as serious editors are driven away." But I think this is the wrong approach -- editing by anonymous ip numbers is barely a problem at all. Under current blocking rules, anons are not given the same "due process" protections as logged in users, and so it's easy enough (other than some very annoying technical limitations which could eventually cause me to change my mind) to deal with. Our biggest problems within the community are not anons trolling and vandalizing, but rather egregious trolls and pov pushers who log in and take advantage of our boundless good will. Making it harder to sign up will not help with this at all, and can actually hurt it if the overall rate of participation by the (good willed) general public declines in the face of some extra burdens of signing up. POV pushers will jump through the hoops of signing up. Making it harder to sign up does nothing to discourage them. So, yes, we need to do something about how long it takes us to get rid of difficult people -- and this is a difficult problem to reconcile with the demands of NPOV and openness and quality. --Jimbo