On Wed, 26 Dec 2007 12:56:05 -0800 (PST), Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
Well, then it's equivalent to "never ban users". Do we want a policy of "never ban users"?
I would actually support that... I think the concept of banning (as opposed to blocking) is not particularly compatible with the principles on which Wikipedia is supposedly run. Blocking is a pragmatic move to attempt to stop (or at least put a speed bump in front of) sprees of vandalism or other abuse or disruption, whether caused by people being evil, insane, trollish, immature, angry, or drunk. Since some of these conditions are capable of going away when the person involved calms down, sobers up, reforms, matures, etc., there's no need for a permanent judgment against the person involved if they're no longer doing whatever was causing problems before. Banning is an attempt to impose a "crime and punishment" model that does not fit comfortably into Wikipedia policy. It's taken to excessive extremes by some fire-breathing admins who insist that any ideas that can be seen as originating with a banned user need to be vigorously suppressed even when a user in good standing suggests them.
On Dec 26, 2007 3:35 PM, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007 12:56:05 -0800 (PST), Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
Well, then it's equivalent to "never ban users". Do we want a policy of "never ban users"?
I would actually support that... I think the concept of banning (as opposed to blocking) is not particularly compatible with the principles on which Wikipedia is supposedly run. Blocking is a pragmatic move to attempt to stop (or at least put a speed bump in front of) sprees of vandalism or other abuse or disruption, whether caused by people being evil, insane, trollish, immature, angry, or drunk. Since some of these conditions are capable of going away when the person involved calms down, sobers up, reforms, matures, etc., there's no need for a permanent judgment against the person involved if they're no longer doing whatever was causing problems before. Banning is an attempt to impose a "crime and punishment" model that does not fit comfortably into Wikipedia policy. It's taken to excessive extremes by some fire-breathing admins who insist that any ideas that can be seen as originating with a banned user need to be vigorously suppressed even when a user in good standing suggests them.
The flip side of this is that there are people who really, really have completely different and incompatible objectives in coming to Wikipedia than the project's purpose of building an encyclopedia.
If one's objective is to "cause trouble" for amusement, to advocate a particular cause without concern for NPOV and balanced coverage, to promote your company or product, then these are valid reasons for which someone maybe just shouldn't be allowed to add or edit content on the encyclopedia.
Neither the Mediawiki tool nor the way online communities (the readers community / greater society, our editors communities, our administrators and policy communities) work make it trivially easy to both allow unlimited open participation and filter act-by-act for activity which is contrary to the purpose of the Encyclopedia. With some users, enough of what they do is contrary to the purpose of the Encyclopedia that it's not worth letting them continue. With some users, they are acting in a calculating and insidious manner to introduce stuff we explicitly don't want (NPOV, BLP, spam, libel, pedophillia, etc) on the sly.
It's one thing to believe in freedom of expression and ideas; it's a very different thing to argue that we not be allowed to set up a walled garden with a specific stated purpose (encyclopedia) and enforce very minimum membership requirements on participation (not be specifically excluded for misbehavior).
The reality is that we don't have the tools to be able to review every edit made. RC patrol and automated bots catch obvious stuff, but anyone with half a brain and clue can work around that. Denying us the tool of exclusion of users leaves us with inadequate filtering and defenses left.