[WikiEN-l] Re: Violation of blocking policy by user "40277"

[Martin Harper]

> This anon user was clearly displaying his intent to continually revert an article, without 
> ever discussing it, and ignore all attempts to converse with him on the issue.

This anon user was clearly displaying his intent to justify his addition in edit summaries, 
and in responding to the edit summary of Jiang, for example. "All attempts" apparently 
didn't extend to such obvious places as [[Talk:Ronald Reagan]]. [[User 
talk:24.4.202.208]] is short and mostly threats.

> As far as I can see, there's only 3 possibilities:

> 1) Give up, let him have the Ronald Reagan article to write in his POV
> 2) Protect the article
> 3) Block him
> Can you think of another alternative?

Several.

1) Discuss. Drop a note on the Talk page. Refer to that note in the edit summary of your 
revert (ie "revert - see Talk page for rationale"), since you know he's reading edit 
summaries.
2) Leave it a day, or a week, or a month. The phrase "at least for the wealthy" in an 
article on Reagan is hardly disastrous, and won't bring Wikipedia into disrepute. A 
pause for reflection may have unexpected benefits for both sides.
3) Compromise. Find a wording that satisfies both of you.
4) Research. Find some statistics demonstrating the economic fortunes of various 
socio-economic classes under Reagan. Add a new section to the article on the subject.
5) Clarify. Replace the woolly and misleading sentence being criticised by the anon user 
with something specific and factual. Eg: "GDP under Reagan increased by 13%".
6) Delete. Just delete the whole sentence, for now.

Some of these will require some actual work, I'm afraid. Better article at the end of the 
day, though - and if you can satisfy both you and the anon user, you've just increased 
the degree to which the article is written from a neutral point of view. Something to aim 
for.

-Martin