Daniel Mayer wrote:
Not me - I find it odd that we tend to bend over backwards to try and accommodate people who exhibit anti-social behavior when this very behavior /has/ resulted in the loss of great contributors in the past (and is threatening to do so for at least two others now - and those are just the ones we have heard from). Do we really want to encourage this type of behavior and thus decrease the average quality of our contributor base? I hope not.
We certainly don't want to encourage this type of behavior, nor do we want to lose good contributors because we are coddling jerks.
At the same time, though, we want to be very careful to preserve what has proven to work, i.e. openness. I mean, we could "close the club" and only allow new people to edit after they have applied to a review board, but I think we would all agree that this would be a disaster for our overall goals.
Openness is important here. Tolerance is important. The encyclopedia is improved, from an NPOV perspective, by having a diversity of contributors.
At the same time, progress towards NPOV goes very quickly when the people with diverse opinions approach an article in a collaborative, rather than competitive, spirit. Mean people who just want to argue and fight do delay the process.
Here's the key: finding ways to not encourage anti-social behavior, and finding ways to retain good contributors, but WITHOUT resorting to heavy-handed tactics that risk doing more harm than good. (I'm not saying that any particular strategies that have been proposed are heavy-handed or not-heavy-handed, I'm just saying that we should be careful about that. Very careful.)
One of the reasons that I'm not generally supportive of locking articles is that "it takes two to tango" in an article edit war. If we want an edit war to stop, we have the power to stop it -- by stopping ourselves. This may not always suit a sense of cosmic justice -- letting the bad guy win for awhile, until we can sort out some agreement in the Talk pages. But I think it will be as effective at stopping edit wars, and demonstrates a certain level of goodwill.
--Jimbo