I agree. And banning is feeding, BTW. Regardless of
the off-site crapola, the rule must be to follow due
process for Wikipedia, on Wikipedia. Be fair to begin
with, and judge particular edits on their merits, not
on a prejudiced (aka offsite info) view of the
contributor.
SV
--- Lisa Thurston <lisathurston(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I second your petition in the strongest way possible
Haukur.
I have no interest whatsoever in User:Amalekite, but
I have a problem
with him/her being banned. If the measure of the
progress of a country
is how well the people on the fringes of society are
treated then the
same goes for Wikipedia.
David said Wikipedia isn't an experiment in
democracy, just an
encyclopaedia. But is WP just an encyclopaedia?
Isn't it a very
special and unique encyclopaedia that is the first
to try to span all
state borders and all languages by coming but to the
cornerstone:
NPOV. So perhaps not democracy, but I think
Wikipedia is a social
experiment of some kind and not just a resource. WP
is special because
of the actual manner in which we are building the
resource. Let's not
ignore that.
Considering WP has potential to beat any other
resource on issue of
**neutrality** let's not do anything to compromise
this. Let's not ban
a user just because of his/her opinions! That's
introducing bias
straightaway. Let's ban the user if and when he or
she actually *does*
something wrong, not for having beliefs we don't
like!! (If I write
something opinionated and not generally accepted on
another site I
don't want it to affect my "user ban case" on
Wikipedia!)
Again this is not about one particular user, it's
about how we deal
with all cases like this. I don't care that
User:Amalekite is
apparently a neo-nazi. This is just a label and is
unhelpful. A user's
actions, ie. edits, are the important thing here.
Lisa
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 22:40:20 -0000 (GMT)
From: Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth(a)hi.is>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: A neo-Nazi wikipedia
> It's not easy to do this all the while knowing
that the editor (in
> this case) personally believes that his
Jewish
Wikipedian colleagues
are
sub-human.
I can only hope it's good exercise for the spirit.
> Amalekite represents a tiny minority of nutcases
who believe that
> certain ethnic groups and races are not
fully
human and do not deserve
to live.
I believe this is a minority view, even within the
racist movement. Other
parts of the racism spectrum are, I fear, rather
more common. Common
enough to form a significant minority view in
some
cases. Exactly where on
the spectrum User:Amalekite dwells I do not know
but he did not seem to be
pushing the idea that certain ethnic groups do
not
deserve to live.
I petition you: Lift your ban on the user. If he
returns to editing (which
I think is fairly unlikely) I'll undertake to
babysit him and if he breaks
any rules I'll immediately take the
appropriate
action.
Regards,
Haukur
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