Erik,
I disagree with your evaluation of both Clutch and Plautus.
I had a long e-mail dialogue with Clutch, plus a phone conversation. He told me plainly that he did not accept the NPOV policy and would therefore leave voluntarily. He made one more post to this mailing list, and I chided him, "Why post here if you don't support the goals of the project?" And that was the end of it. I think it was more of a mutual "we agree to disagree" kind of thing than an actual ban -- unlike Helga.
In Plautus's case, he has shown sufficient willingness to dialogue with me to merit my continued Mediation efforts. I must chide you for calling him "mentally unbalanced" and "delusional", for two reasons: (a) you have not show me that you have psychiatric credentials, and (b) I don't think a psychiatrist can diagnose someone merely by reading their Internet posts (both A and B would have to be true, to justify your "diagnosis"). Please give me more time to teach Plautus our ways: the way of NPOV and the way of courtesy.
Uncle Ed
Ed-
you're probably right. Plautus is just a misguided individual. All this calling other users "dumb motherfuckers" and "fucking ignorant assholes" has to be expected from a confused newbie. After all you yourself once created a "Fucking asshole" account to make a point, remember?
Surely it is acceptable to lose 10 devoted, creative Wikipedians if we can keep a single crackpot around. I should really stop being so judgmental and leave the important decisions to the people who got their priorities straight, instead of looking at silly things like polls and hard evidence.
If Ed believes that an individual is reformable, then we need to all sit back and let the spirit of Sun Myung Moon work through him. I can't wait to see you do your magic, Ed!
I have just one condition.
If this whole thing blows in your face, I want you to take full responsibility for it. That means that I want you to go through every single page Plautus satire edited in the last few days, to take diffs of these edits and fix them if necessary. That includes erased comments on talk pages, something he is very fond of.
How about it, Ed? Do you want the whole community to share your faith, or are you ready to fix things up if that faith turns out to be mistaken?
Regards,
Erik