Jonathan Walther wrote:
I agree with all of this, except with your diagnosis of the current situation. Can you show me examples of "anarchists" who are arguing that we "we might decide *not* to ban people for their trollish behavior at all"?
The Cunctator springs to mind. As an anarchist myself, I can't say I agree with him though.
I'm reasonably well-acquainted with the Cunc's views, and I am under the distinct impression that he supports temporary ip-based bans for raw vandalism. He prefers it when we have soft security rather than hard security. He prefers to try to reform people than to ban them, and so on.
I imagine that he would support not banning people at all, _only if_ viable and superior alternatives can be found. (And I imagine he supports the search for those viable and superior alternatives.)
So I don't count him as an "anarchist" in the relevant sense.
I don't know about Wikipedia "really suffering and losing people", but I am clear that Lirs efforts create vastly more work than the rest of us can keep up with in "fixing" her edits.
I mean, her edit to the article on Sir Isaac Newton to include "prisms"... maybe it might be appropriate to mention prisms in the article, but the way she did it was like she was just trying to fill someones shoes with wet sloppy diarrhea.
In what sense do you refer to yourself as an "anarchist"? I think it's important to get beyond the political meaning of the term, which some people have some affinity for, and recognize that Larry means it in a specific sense.
Basically, I think that Larry's concerns are way overstated. All of the things he said we needed were already in place.
--Jimbo