Message: 1 Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 00:27:47 -0400 From: Phil Sandifer sandifer@sbcglobal.net Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Message-ID: 6E61B93E-C5B9-4FE1-8191-DC6C2BD1FE0C@sbcglobal.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

Oh for god's sake.

The technical evidence against Cranston is a slam dunk. He's a troll. He's a vicious, sockpuppeting troll who uses sockpuppets to try to generate fake consensus. He's the sort of user we routinely shoot on sight, and it's a good thing we do, because we have too damn many of them, and every time one manages to generate the headache that this has become, good users get driven off. Kudos to every admin who blocked him, everyone who called for his removal from this list, and everybody who tried to shut this mess down.

Oh, sure. Gun down the barbarians from the windows of our railroad train out of laziness. In cold blood, too. Is this ethical? Sure, it's the convenient thing to do. But it's kinda lazy, and, besides, some folks like to have vandalish fun. Let 'em. Sure, it might mean more work for those of us who staff Wikipedia, but, let's face it, we all have a prankstering vandal under our tough, matter-of-fact, researching, teaching exteriors. That being said, there ARE cases in which trolls should be banned, such as when they go on the warpath against other Wikipedians, or pull hard-to-undo crap such as deleting pictures or stuff like that.

As for those who want to plead for more leniency and say that people were dismissive of him, wake up. This project is huge. Huge projects attract idiocy. They attract idiocy of the page vandal sort, and idiocy of the far more insidious sort. People who come to the project for their own ego, people who come to the project to advance their own agendas, and people who want to cause the project harm and who are actually good at doing it.

So? It's mainly the folks who want to harm our project - and the folks who are good at harming our project - who ought to be banned, obviously. Other idiocy can be dealt with by editing, or invoking the 3RR rule (temporary bans), or other stuff like that.

This doesn't mean we don't welcome new users. It doesn't mean we treat everybody with suspicion. But it means that we learn to call a spade a spade, and we stop feeling bad about coming down like a ton of bricks on people who are disrupting the project. We do not need to care why. We need to be willing to make social decisions with the same dispassionate "What will make this situation better" eye that we handle our articles with. If a user is breaking articles and making it so people can't edit, we shoot them.

Ahem. If a user is breaking articles, give him or her a pause to catch his or her breath. If he or she is making it so folks can't edit, THEN we should shoot. We should be fair to both Wikipedians and Wikipedia.

That's it. That's all that's going to work. If we do not learn to come down on Cranstons with fury and speed, over time, this community will implode. One need only look at nearly every other Internet community to figure that one out.

Umm, okay, especially if the "Cranstons" are here to be trolls, and not to be constructive. Bear in mind, however, that many of us probably do like to contribute to BJAODN now and then.

Good job David. Good job SlimVirgin.

-Snowspinner

If the banned user deserved to be banned, then, yeah, I agree. Did the banned user deserve to be banned? I dunno.

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