Jim Schuler wrote:
On 12/1/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>
wrote:
> Rob wrote:
>> This is an absurd comparison. Rational people are completely capable
>> of distinguishing between normal partisan politics and a group which
>> advocates mass extermination.
> And furthermore, and this is important in this particular example,
> rational people are completely capable of distinguishing between
someone
> with sincerely held but deeply misguided
beliefs or attitudes who is
> sincerely trying to nevertheless work well with others to create a fair
> encyclopedic set of articles on difficult topics, and someone who is
> just slapping stuff on a userpage to try to yank people's chains.
>
> This is not a case of censorship of the poor repressed Nazis. This is
a
simple
simple simple case of blocking a troll and moving on with life
without worrying about it.
--Jimbo
No disrespect, Jimmy, but I don't think anyone was defending Nazis. It
seems to me that some of us were attempting to hold a philosophical
discussion on a broader topic, not a topical conversation on the banning
of
one person.
Right, me too. :) The point is, if the broad philosophical question is
"Do we ban people for merely holding unpleasant or unpopular beliefs?"
then the answer is "no, we never have, and there seems to be very little
support for doing so". If the point is "Does asserting unpleasant or
unpopular beliefs automatically get you a free pass to be any sort of
jerk you like, because we are planning to bend over backwards to make
sure we don't ever ever ever discriminate against Nazis?" then the
answer is, "no, being a disruptive troll is still being a disruptive
troll."
The day a kind, thoughtful, productive and intellectual person shows up
to help us with the encyclopedia project while simultaneously asserting
with all seriousness that the Nazi party of Germany was or is worthy of
support, we'll have a hell of an interesting case on our hands. But the
reality is, that hasn't happened and seems very unlikely to ever happen.
--Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Good points, and essentially what I was getting at. You're right about
the hypothetical, that *would* be a very interesting case were it to
happen. More interesting, I think, would be the reaction of Wikipedians to
that person. Might make a good book. ;)
--
