[WikiEN-l] Erik's Excellent Idea

Poor, Edmund W Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com
Wed Mar 10 14:16:45 UTC 2004


Erik was at his eloquent best when he wrote:

<< It's not supposed to minimally intrusive. It's supposed
to be effective. Right now we have the situation that
there is a set of users who are quite productive, but who
use edit warring as a technique to get an article into
the revision they want it to be in.

That is so much in contradiction with everything we stand
for that we should take immediate countermeasures. It
creates a very bad impression for newbies if we let
people get away with that kind of behavior without an
immediate reaction.

A 24 hour ban is not the same as a regular ban in the
effects on the user. We can come up with a nice, friendly
standard text, basically telling the user to calm down
and when they are ready to respect our policies, please
return to editing. It won't develop into the kind of
problems we had with Lir, because there's no incentive to
create another identity if you can just keep editing
under your regular one 24 hours later. We could even add
a clause that if they pledge to stop edit warring
immediately, they can be unbanned immediately (of course
if they break that pledge, they will be rebanned). >>


This is what I've been saying the whole time. Thank you, O Eloquent One!

The only variant I would add is that each "ban" should be subject to
review and appeal -- by the Mediation or Arbitration Committees. 

That is the essential difference between Vigilantism (which we all
oppose) and Democracy (which I think most of us support).

Let's put this to vote.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed



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