On Sunday 26 May 2002 12:01 pm, : lcrocker wrote:

There's no real conflict; there's one anonymous crackpot with a pet theory, and the rest of the reasonable community.  The crackpot doesn't even /try/ to follow our guidelines here--he simply wants to make that article an advertisement for his pseudoscientific bullshit, and when we try to make a useful article out of it, he just restores his crap.  I don't think we should "lock" the article, but only because that prevents other reasonable people from editing it.  I /do/ think we should ban the crackpot if he doesn't give up.

Hum, I don't know about banning his IP; that seems to be a drastic measure given that the "crackpot's" focus is on a single page. However, I think we should at least try to make his version closer to NPOV by editing it and placing in appropriate qualifiers. Such as; "Larson says X, however working scientists in the field say Y." The protection on the page has been lifted and Doug has already been warned <not> to simply replace the current version with his own. We should consider a ban <If> and <only> if, he reverts the article again. Otherwise I think we should at least try to make his version more NPOV.

In general, though, I think we should not make hard-and-fast rules about use of sysop features.  We should use judgment, and do whatever is good for the project.  A content war between reasonable people who disagree is one thing, and we should treat such a conflict with respect.  But a crackpot spreading total nonsense is another, and we should use whatever tools we have to defend against his damage.

Well since I was the one who protected the page, I guess I have to agree with you Lee. ;) Actually, I totally agree with you - within the context of a general framework, we should be able to exercise case-by-case judgement as to when we use our sysop powers to do what we feel is the best <for the good of the project.>.

With that said, I do think that a slightly different protocol for protecting pages needs to be devised (otherwise the question would not have been posed in the first place). Should we bother the list with requests for protecting particular pages? If so, then it would also make sense to bother the list to ban IPs since I feel this is even a more drastic measure than <temporarily> protecting a page. However, a lot of damage can be done during the delay.... This may not be as much of an issue with protecting a single page though (since it can just be restored later). On the other hand, others may make valid edits to the POV version inputed by a troll which causes versioning issues that would have to be worked-out later. My view, is that the sysop doing the protecting should list the reasons why on the talk for the page and the lock should be limited in duration (unless it is on the main or one of the policy pages). It would also be nice to have a comment field on the protection page and and an easy to find log of 'who has protected what' and why.

In this particular case, I looked over the edit history of the page, and read both the talk and old talk. After that, it was my personal <judgement> that Doug's actions bordered on vandalism since he was replacing an agreed upon version with his own biased one. But I did not feel that it would at all have been appropriate to consider banning his IP <because> his actions were only directed at a single page. This may have been an error in judgement on my part since this had the effect of not allowing <anybody> but sysops to edit the page (it would be nice to have the ability to limit certain classes of contributors from editing a protected page - <only> blocking non-logged-in users would have worked in this case). All I wanted to do was to force a truce in order to stop the version war <so that> a compromise could be reached.

I could have <easily> protected the page and not tell anybody about it.

PS PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE lets limit this discussion so that we can discuss the FAR more interesting ideas on beta/stable. I fear that this will become a red herring and trump that discussion...

maveric149