Hello everyone,
About hate speech, I don't think Wikipedia needs any
specific policy about it. We really need two things:
(1) the ability to -effectively- ban trolls, and
(2) the will to use the ability.
I think (1) is more important right now. Blocking and banning
are easy to work around, since one need simply make a sock
puppet or edit without logging in. Item (2) is simply irrelevant
until WP can strongly enforce bans and blocks.
I really have no idea how to implement (1). I hope someone's
working on it. I'd be interested to hear out any proposals.
About (2): We don't need a hate speech policy, because we
should simply ban time wasting morons on sight. It doesn't
take months of agonizing to figure out who's a troll.
We should empower trustworthy people to ban trolls, and
then let them. This probably implies increasing the ranks of
the arbitration committee to, say, several hundred.
I don't recommend making rules about who's a troll.
Trolls love rules, as others have noted. I'd rather just
have a vote among enough (say a few dozen) of
the arbitrators. We don't have rules about what's a
keepable article, we vote on them. I don't see any
reason that voting can't work against trolls.
Frankly, I'm puzzled that WP is so tolerant of trolling.
I believe trolls are the biggest threat to WP, by far.
There are not very many, but they eat up time and resources
far out of proportion to their numbers. Worst of all, they
drive away real editors. We tolerate this at our own risk.
For what it's worth,
Robert Dodier
(Wile E. Heresiarch)
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