On Dec 26, 2007 3:35 PM, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007 12:56:05 -0800 (PST), Ken
Arromdee
<arromdee(a)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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com