David Gerard wrote:

On 01/10/06, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Whether we are talking about companies or fictitious islands, I do not believe "block, nuke, and salt the Earth more aggressively!" is the answer. That's partially because blocking is a very, very flawed tool (it's very easy to circumvent), and "hard" security measures in a fundamentally open environment tend to only inspire people to find clever ways to circumvent them and to make themselves even more of a PITA than they already are. Of course we should block individuals where appropriate, but I'm not convinced that increasing the amount of blocking and nuking is going to help us much right now.

Yes.

Danny, Brad: please understand that making up a new special rule every time there's a new problem is a *really bad* thing to do.

Which is why neither Danny nor Brad made up a new special rule, nor did either of them advocate it. They advocated strengthening and/or changing our attitudes and culture. An admittedly difficult task, but one we need to work on.

Part of the problem is the many people who sort of get the message, but immediately translate these calls into the "new special rule" that will "solve everything for all time". I understand a new speedy deletion criterion has already been proposed. With my tongue in my cheek, I'm somewhat inclined to take a page from Ed Poor's book and speedily delete the speedy deletion criteria.

Erik's message cautions about how we shouldn't misuse the tools we have in achieving this cultural change. That's a perceptive observation as well. He went on to advocate working on a better annotation feature, which might be of some help with this problem. (Though it must be noted that new features lend themselves particularly well to this problem of "new special rules".) But the thing is, we can't really wait around for all these promised, or merely even conceived-of, features. We need to address problems when they come to our attention, not simply say we'll get around to dealing with them later.

--Michael Snow