On Fri, 2002-10-25 at 13:52, Gareth Owen wrote:
The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com writes:
I think that most people would agree that in an ideal situation, banning would be unnecessary
I think everyone would agree. However, since our situation is less than ideal, I don't see the relevance.
It's just the same with NPOV. NPOV is the ideal situation. Our situation is less than ideal. That doesn't mean NPOV is not relevant.
These things are relevant since we have near-complete power to define the rules of the society--and the environment in which the society exist. Wikipedia is almost a purely closed system, having a relationship with the "real world" only (just about) at the intersections of law (limited to copyright issues, mostly) and physical constraints (which are very limited; as Jimbo has said, we can assume infinite disk space). The other primary limiting factors are human behavior and software capability. Both of these factors are highly malleable, given time and the right approach.
In short, with effort, we should be able to approximate the ideal as close as necessary.