[WikiEN-l] 172--what happened

[Matthew Woodcraft]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 01:05:31PM -0500, daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> I am not justifying the original block. I simply regarded it as a way
> of stopping a form of vandalism--and yes, I believe that forcing POV
> on an article and erasing text because it does not conform to a
> particular POV is a form of vandalism.

I think we should not extend the term 'vandalism' in this way. It makes
communication more difficult.

There is a distinction to be made between destructive edits that don't
make any pretence to be encyclopedic, and ones which do. This
distinction is a very useful one, because edits of the first type are
not controversial, while edits of the second type sometimes are.

We have a consensus that repeated 'vandalism' can be a reason to
protect a page, and indeed that 'vandals' should be banned.

When this consensus was reached, the word 'vandal' was being used to
describe people like fartboy, not people who write only their own point
of view, or remove others' points of view while they edit articles,
though we have always had visits from both kinds of people.

Now, if we want to decide that some forms of edit of the second type
should also be a general cause for protecting pages, banning, or
whatever, this list is certainly an appropriate place to discuss it.

But it is better to say 'such and such a behaviour is sufficiently bad
that we should protect pages when it occurs', than to try to redefine
'vandalism' and then say 'but see, we already know how to deal with
vandals'.

-M-