Ed wrote:
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 Tuesday 22 October 2002 03:27 pm lcrocker wrote:
I proposed exactly that once, but the idea got little support. I'm all for it, though I don't think even a complete block really shuts down dialog. After all, Bridget did show up here on the list, and she's quite free to e-mail anyone (the "you're blocked" page shows the user who blocked you, and the "e-mail this user" function is not blocked).
I vote for this too - this would give a person who is trying to "hijack" a page time to focus on crafting their arguments on why the page should be changed. Most contributors want us to have the best encyclopedia there is so we will listen and consider the arguments. But I would probably freeze the page as Ortolan suggests before I would block a user. I would also only resort to blocking the "hijacker" from editing anything in the 'article namespace' if they did something to subvert the process like copying their version under a different page name and then proceded to orphan the frozen page by pointing all links to it to their version at the new page title.
But the real issue is acceptable criteria for imposing such a block. While we all agree that outright vandalism and obscenity are legitimate reasons and that "point of view" and "emotional involvement" are really bad reasons, I hold that "demonstrated unwillingness to work with others" is a perfectly legitimate one as well, so long as one judges this on genuine content-neutral grounds. Others may disagree.
Not me - I find it odd that we tend to bend over backwards to try and accommodate people who exhibit anti-social behavior when this very behavior /has/ resulted in the loss of great contributors in the past (and is threatening to do so for at least two others now - and those are just the ones we have heard from). Do we really want to encourage this type of behavior and thus decrease the average quality of our contributor base? I hope not.
....
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 right. We are a community of contributors and if somebody can't work with the community then they are working against it. Nobody gets paid to contribute to Wikipedia and the only reason people do contribute is because they derive some enjoyment from it.
The question before is this; What type of "enjoyment" do we want to encourage? I for one enjoy working with very intelligent people from all around the world while writing a unique, neutral, free and useful encyclopedia. Other people enjoy being anti-social and/or starting fights while pushing their own POV agendas.
Which type of contributor should be bend over backwards to keep?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Not me - I find it odd that we tend to bend over backwards to try and accommodate people who exhibit anti-social behavior when this very behavior /has/ resulted in the loss of great contributors in the past (and is threatening to do so for at least two others now - and those are just the ones we have heard from). Do we really want to encourage this type of behavior and thus decrease the average quality of our contributor base? I hope not.
We certainly don't want to encourage this type of behavior, nor do we want to lose good contributors because we are coddling jerks.
At the same time, though, we want to be very careful to preserve what has proven to work, i.e. openness. I mean, we could "close the club" and only allow new people to edit after they have applied to a review board, but I think we would all agree that this would be a disaster for our overall goals.
Openness is important here. Tolerance is important. The encyclopedia is improved, from an NPOV perspective, by having a diversity of contributors.
At the same time, progress towards NPOV goes very quickly when the people with diverse opinions approach an article in a collaborative, rather than competitive, spirit. Mean people who just want to argue and fight do delay the process.
Here's the key: finding ways to not encourage anti-social behavior, and finding ways to retain good contributors, but WITHOUT resorting to heavy-handed tactics that risk doing more harm than good. (I'm not saying that any particular strategies that have been proposed are heavy-handed or not-heavy-handed, I'm just saying that we should be careful about that. Very careful.)
One of the reasons that I'm not generally supportive of locking articles is that "it takes two to tango" in an article edit war. If we want an edit war to stop, we have the power to stop it -- by stopping ourselves. This may not always suit a sense of cosmic justice -- letting the bad guy win for awhile, until we can sort out some agreement in the Talk pages. But I think it will be as effective at stopping edit wars, and demonstrates a certain level of goodwill.
--Jimbo
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