[Foundation-l] Porchesia

[David Gerard]

On 01/10/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Whether we are talking about companies or fictitious islands, I do not
> believe "block, nuke, and salt the Earth more aggressively!" is the
> answer. That's partially because blocking is a very, very flawed tool
> (it's very easy to circumvent), and "hard" security measures in a
> fundamentally open environment tend to only inspire people to find
> clever ways to circumvent them and to make themselves even more of a
> PITA than they already are. Of course we should block individuals
> where appropriate, but I'm not convinced that increasing the amount of
> blocking and nuking is going to help us much right now.


Yes.

Danny, Brad: please understand that making up a new special rule every
time there's a new problem is a *really bad* thing to do.

Ad hoc rules are where instruction creep comes from. This leads to a
confusing and incoherent thicket of rules that no-one can make sense
of. Special cases make bad law.

I had a press interview with the Daily Telegraph on Friday. A large
chunk of that was him telling me how confusing our bureaucracy already
was to newcomers. Please don't make it even worse.

(Main article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PRO )


- d.