Mike,

Very good. I subscribe to everything you wrote and I'll second any proposal you or anyone else makes in that direction.

Sincerely,

Virgilio A. P. Machado

At 07:30 20-10-2010, you wrote:

Hello,

From what I have seen about Greg Kohs is that he does have some interesting points to make, but I do see that he is jumping to conclusions and does seem to have a biased viewpoint.

People want to make their own decisions and have enough information to do that. We don't want to have important information deleted away because it is uncomfortable.

Banning him makes it less likely for him to be heard, and these interesting points which are worth considering are not heard my many people : this is depriving people of critical information, that is not fair to the people involved.

Just look at this article for example, it is quite interesting and well written, and why should it not be visible to everyone on the list.

http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikimedia-foundation-director...

Deleting and banning people who say things that are not comfortable, that does make you look balanced and trustworthy.

The Wikimedia foundation should be able to stand up to such accusations without resorting to gagging people, it just gives more credit to the people being gagged and makes people wonder if there is any merit in what they say.

This brings up my favorite subject of unneeded deletions versions needed ones.

Of course there is material that should be deleted that is hateful, Spam etc, lets call that evil content.

But the articles that i wrote and my friends wrote that were deleted did not fall into that category, they might have been just bad or not notable.

We have had a constant struggle to keep our articles from being deleted in a manner that we consider unfair. Additionally, the bad content is lost and falls into the same category as evil content.

Also there should be more transparency on deleted material on the Wikipedia itself, there is a lot of information that is being deleted and gone forever without proper process or review.

In my eyes there is a connection between the two topics, the banning of people and the deleting of information. Both are depriving people from information that they want and need in an unfair manner.

Instead of articles about obscure events, things, and old places in Kosovo you have a wikipedia full of the latest information about every television show, is that what you really want?

I think there should be room for things in places that are not not notable because they are not part of mainstream pop culture, we also need to support the underdogs of Wikipedia even if they are not mainstream, Mr Kohs definitely has something to say and I would like like to hear it. And the Kosovars have something to say even if the Serbs don't want to hear it. The Albanians have something to say even if the Greeks don't want to hear it, etc. There are many cases of people from Kosovo and Albania driven out of Wikipedia and depriving the project of important information because they are not able to get started and the contributions are so far way from the dominating political viewpoint of the opposite side that they don't even get a chance to be heard.

We need to make a way for these people to be heard and to moderate the conflicts better, that will make Wikipedia stronger and more robust.

thanks, mike