My opinion would be no, because I thought we were never to use sysop privileges in a fight over content. I would like to hear what others think, though. I know there's been some conflict over the page.
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.
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. 0
lcrocker@nupedia.com 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.
I think that's right. I think that a case could be made -- but we'd need to get some consensus first -- that locking the article to prevent him from overwriting it would be justified if we already had banned him, and if he was evading the ban. Removing the object of his affection might help in a case like that.
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.
I agree with this, subject to a caveat that we should take the sysop code of honor seriously, and try hard not to have it come to this.
The banning of 24 was done only after much soul searching. It seems to have worked.
--Jimbo
I'm still noticing some pages that appear different when viewed and when edited. Also, while looking through stub articles one entry was:
116(43 chars) Pierre and Marie Curie
But when I looked at the article in question at http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Pierre_and_Marie_Curie there were clearly more than 43 characters in it.
Has the static page cache not been completely updated yet since being re-enabled?
-- "Let there be light." - Last words of Bomb #20, "Dark Star"
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