In a message dated 11/7/2009 12:44:42 PM Pacific Standard Time,
andreengels(a)gmail.com writes:
No, we don't. We need forces to help the
encyclopedia get further. We
don't need a force of people who stop people who are helping creating
it, and we don't need a force of people who support people who are not
helping creating it.>>
You are completely ignoring what I said.
Police do not help the work move forward. Police never help any progress
progress. Their only function is to stop something, not to make anything
occur.
You are labeling all those blocked as being vandals. That is begging the
question. The very point, is that many of those blocked, perhaps even most
of them, did *not* deserve it at all. Appealing to another admin is
pointless, all admins support each other in the same way that all police support
each other. It's called a Police State. That is what the term implies. That
is what we have in the project. The fact that many people can work just
fine within a Police State is not the same as saying that such a situation is
ideal or even matches the real world.
In the real world, we do not run society at the whim of the police.
Stating that people can appeal to ArbCom is fairly silly. We are discussing
trying to get people to become involved in the project. Not trying to teach them
how to run power games in a massive RPG. That is the exact opposite of
what I had hoped we were trying to do. If the entire project is a game then
we've failed. If we are forcing people to learn all the gamer rules just to
get their points considered, then we've failed. If we have a sink or swim
mentality for all new contributors then we've failed.
That's my point. A vanishingly tiny number of admins ever seek out and try
to help people who are blocked. Everyone is guiltly until they prove their
own innocence in a system which frowns on anyone trying to do so. That's
not the type of society that the majority of people want to live under. And
yet that's the type we've created. Anyone who has tried to learn how to win
under this sort of oppression in-project knows exactly what I'm speaking
about. I'm not sure that any admin would understand it. That's a given.
It's hard to show the police that a police state is a bad thing. That's why we
in the real world have checks against police abuse.
What I'm saying is that we need the exact same type of checks in the
project.
You had said previously that when this "Community Approval" was tried,
every block was challenged. Yes. Every person blocked is going to say "I'm
innocent". You see it on death row as well. No criminal is ever guilty. But
to presume that somehow that's not what we want, is to say that the real
world, in which we all live, is not what we want. That what we want is
criminals to behave nicely and not complain about the quality of food in prison.
And for those falsely locked up, to just serve their term and have no
"Innocence Project". I disagree.
Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And that proof should not rest
in the arms of a sole person as it does in our project. In our project a
person can be locked up indefinitly with no trial, and no appeal. And you
wonder why people get disenchanted.
Will Johnson