Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales (jwales@wikia.com) [050106 07:13]:
Even so, I think it is fairly clear that we have in the past been too "co-dependent" with trolls. We don't want or need a brutal and random crackdown, and I think we are already strongly drifting in the right direction. The recent arbcom elections suggested to me a community desire for stricter standards of behavior.
"Harsh but fair"? I've also been discussing this with people of late on [[User talk:Dante Alighieri]] and [[User talk:David Gerard]].
One essential point to keep in mind is that Wikipedia isn't an experiment in Internet community democracy - it's a project to write an encyclopedia.
Visible fairness of process is essential to not pissing off the volunteers (I have many years' experience in managing volunteers; you'll get ten times the work from a volunteer that you'd get from any paid employee, but they must feel good about the enterprise), but disruptive behaviour causes serious problems with the volunteer work environment. That's why I'm so down on personal abuse, for example - one stroppy arsehole can make a quiet, friendly editor quit an article and never come back. The stroppy editor wins but the project loses.
- d.