Well, this gets to my other point. I haven't checked my watchlist this morning, but I'm assuming that the person who made this crazy rant -- who was blocked until late last night for 3RR and other bad behaviors -- is going to come back full speed if he hasn't already. I have no reason to believe he won't continue to make the same crazy rants. It's one thing to remove somebody's offensive talk page comment that's 5 months old, but what if they're still banging on about it? Do we then get into the practice of actively censoring someone's speech? Are we to be expected to come behind this person and simply erase that portion of his comments every time they get made?
K.
----- Original Message ---- From: Matt Brown morven@gmail.com To: Katefan0 katefan0@yahoo.com; English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 11:11:37 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout
On 12/13/05, Katefan0 katefan0@yahoo.com wrote:
I'd like to reiterate that the information I am assuming he's unhappy with wasn't backed up by sourcing, it was just a crazy rant about his relationship with UT and his book being biased.
We can't stop crazy rants and we can't go around deleting each one from article histories - removing them from the current version should be enough in almost all cases.
In many cases we should consider removing them from the article's talk page (but not its history).
-matt
On 12/13/05, Katefan0 katefan0@yahoo.com wrote:
Well, this gets to my other point. I haven't checked my watchlist this morning, but I'm assuming that the person who made this crazy rant -- who was blocked until late last night for 3RR and other bad behaviors -- is going to come back full speed if he hasn't already. I have no reason to believe he won't continue to make the same crazy rants. It's one thing to remove somebody's offensive talk page comment that's 5 months old, but what if they're still banging on about it? Do we then get into the practice of actively censoring someone's speech? Are we to be expected to come behind this person and simply erase that portion of his comments every time they get made?
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a free speech forum. People who are using Wikipedia as a place to store their latest rants need to find somewhere else to go; if they don't, it's our obligation as curators of this encyclopedia to push them out the door. Forcefully, if need be.
Kelly