On Tuesday, October 22, 2002, at 03:27 PM, wikipedia-l- request@nupedia.com wrote:

Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 15:06:41 -0700 To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com, "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Less than an outright ban From: lcrocker@nupedia.com Cc: Reply-To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com

...

Maybe we should revive the idea of a partial ban:

• Contributor blocked from editing articles -- stops the edit war
• But can still edit talk pages -- which keeps dialogue open

On Wikipedia, we can't see whether the troublemakers are adults or not, so we give them the benefit of the doubt. But some of them probably are, in fact, children. It wouldn't surprize me a bit to discover that Lir is a very bright 14-year old. Why should we bend over backwards to give such a person presumed rights here that even the most liberal of us wouldn't grant in real life?

And since we can't know the physical age of someone here, it is perfectly reasonable for us to evaluate the /actual actions/ of of contributors, and to judge whether or not they have the maturity to work within this system. If someone acts like a 10-year-old, they should be treated like one. A block isn't saying "you're an awful person" or anything--it's just saying "go to your room for a while, the grown-ups are talking".

That's a good point and a good analogy. I never considered that Lir might, in fact, be a kid. It was hard to imagine someone so belligerent would survive very well in university (I assumed she was student based on her thankfully now - forgotten Iowa State jag), but then again, I've been out of school for a while. Maybe things have changed.

Dave De Paoli