|From: "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com |Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2002 15:10:20 -0400 | | |Okay, the "ban" is lifted. Gimme a break, okay? | |I just wanted to re-focus the talk constructively, but then Lee is like, let the kids bicker and pull hair, as long as they don't damage the furniture. | |Ed
How about, instead of stopping *people*, we froze *articles*, including talk pages, for a day, week, or month, until everyone calmed down?
That is, when it starts getting thick and hot, rather than coming down on someone, we simply shut off access to the opportunity to snipe, edit-war, insult, and so forth.
There is *plenty* of time to get an article organized, whether on anti-semitism, or Copernicus's little-appreciated contribution to the Prussian coinage, or even the law, but if people are firing back and forth in the article and on the talk page with only minutes between salvos, we may never get the articles we need. We can wait even a month or longer, but people in heat can't stay in heat a month, no matter how much they might want to.
In the worst cases, an admin or other responsible individual could look over the entire subject, refactor or rewrite the article, and then open the floodgates again after the fuss had had a chance to die down.
As it is, after months of good contributions by Julie, we lose her in two weeks to some hit-and-run artists who might actually have something to contribute if they weren't so keen on scoring points. Remove the opportunity for scoring points, remove the dread of logging in to Wikipedia when this kind of thing is happening, and take a crack at making an encyclopedia.
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88
PS - I speak from personal experience at firing off half cocked.
Tom