JAY JG wrote:
Furthermore, he has said some pretty vile things about Wikipedians, admittedly on other boards; but if he had posted a list of Wikipedians who he thought were "niggers", I wonder if the consensus for banning him would be stronger. Perhaps the word "kike" doesn't have quite the same taboo quality.
For me it does.
Personally I don't think that Nazis should be banned from Wikipedia simply for being Nazis/White supremacists. In fact, there are at least a couple that I know of who do edit, albeit generally unsuccessfully. As for the rest, in my experience, the complete inability of most of them to abide by policy, or even think rationally and present logical arguments, combined with their typical belligerence, gets them quickly banned anyway.
I think that's right, and I re-iterate my promise to the community that I'm more than happy to engage in the single largest mass banning without any sort of due process at all of an entire group of Neo-Nazi users if we determine that they actually are disrupting our work in any serious way and that this action seems to be the only or best way of dealing with the problem.
Wikipedia is not a democracy.
Let me explain this a bit more. I do not believe in the "benevolent dictator" model for Wikipedia. Our project is of major historical significance, and it is not appropriate for any one person to be the benevolent dictator of all human knowledge. Obviously.
But we have retained a 'constitutional monarchy' in our system and the main reason for it is too _support_ and _make possible_ a very open system in which policy is set organically by the community and democratic processes and institutions emerge over a long period of experimentation and consensus-building. No one needs to be afraid that VfD will be hijacked, and our rules turned against us.
It is not possible for 10,000 NeoNazis (if such numbers exist) to storm into Wikipedia and take it over by subverting our organic democratic processes because I will not allow it. Period. So we don't have to overdesign those processes out of a paranoia of a hostile takeover.
But this also means that we don't need to over-react right now. We can wait and see. They'll talk a big game but just review those message boards and then look around here. A battle of wits between Wikipedians and Nazis? I know who I'm betting on.
That said, I think that banning *this particular* user was justified, based on the issues listed above.
I very much agree with that. I think posting hate speech about Wikipedia users on another site is sufficient grounds for banning, whether our current rules say so or not.
--Jimbo