At 05:42 PM 06/09/02 -0400, The Cunctator wrote:
On Fri, 2002-09-06 at 17:35, Bryan Derksen wrote:
Banning someone for being disruptive is not necessarily the top of a "slippery slope" towards censorship, as long as we're careful about doing it and keep a watchful eye on ourselves. On the other hand, letting disruptive yahoos get away with everything will eventually mean that only the disruptive yahoos stick around.
This would be a valid argument if the only way to prevent "disruptive yahoos" from "get[ting] away with everything" is to ban them.
Odd bit of logic there, not sure if I can untangle it. Of course banning people isn't the _only_ way to stop disruptive people from disrupting, there are other gentler strategies to try beforehand. But what I'm objecting to is a reluctance to use banning _after_ those other strategies have failed, which means that disruptive people who are immune to those other strategies (the merciless editing and ignoring you mention below) _do_ "get away with everything" because there's nothing else we can do to stop them.
But it isn't. Rather, merciless editing and ignoring personality has worked every time so far.
It's also resulted in the loss of a number of excellent contributors. I believe that relying on merciless editing and ignoring doesn't work _well_, and that being more willing to ban disruptive people will result in a higher quality of Wikipedia overall.
Maybe we should try it and see.