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