Hello everyone,

About hate speech, I don't think Wikipedia needs any specific policy about it. We really need two things: (1) the ability to -effectively- ban trolls, and (2) the will to use the ability.

I think (1) is more important right now. Blocking and banning are easy to work around, since one need simply make a sock puppet or edit without logging in. Item (2) is simply irrelevant until WP can strongly enforce bans and blocks.

I really have no idea how to implement (1). I hope someone's working on it. I'd be interested to hear out any proposals.

About (2): We don't need a hate speech policy, because we should simply ban time wasting morons on sight. It doesn't take months of agonizing to figure out who's a troll. We should empower trustworthy people to ban trolls, and then let them. This probably implies increasing the ranks of the arbitration committee to, say, several hundred.

I don't recommend making rules about who's a troll. Trolls love rules, as others have noted. I'd rather just have a vote among enough (say a few dozen) of the arbitrators. We don't have rules about what's a keepable article, we vote on them. I don't see any reason that voting can't work against trolls.

Frankly, I'm puzzled that WP is so tolerant of trolling. I believe trolls are the biggest threat to WP, by far. There are not very many, but they eat up time and resources far out of proportion to their numbers. Worst of all, they drive away real editors. We tolerate this at our own risk.

For what it's worth, Robert Dodier (Wile E. Heresiarch)

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