I doubt many people would ask such questions; I mean, such a person would be beneath contempt and therefore not particularly interesting as a subject of such speculation.

I know this is all hypothetical, and that "beneath contempt" is a stock phrase, but I am strongly opposed to holding anyone "beneath contempt."

As far as I am concerned contempt is a part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Let's take a brief example. As I understand it Helga deserved the oportunity to make her case as best she could, and we had a responsibility to take her seriously, to look at her case and ask the right questions, and offer her an opportunity to learn to work with us. And then later, when that failed, we had a responsibility to ask her to leave. We had this responsibility because she was not respecting others in the community by: refusing to take seriously questions about the credibility of her sources, insulting a number of core contributors, and disregarding core policies like the NPoV.

One of the ways that we can better respect people in our community is to set out clear rules, and to enforce those rules. I personally think there is a lot more which can be done using social pressures (so called SoftSecurity) rather than technological means (a banning feature of the hardware), but I don't think we can afford the pie-in-the-sky attitude that banning, page freezes, etc. will always be unnecessary.

Yours Mark Christensen