In a message dated 11/7/2009 12:44:42 PM Pacific Standard Time, andreengels@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