Daniel Mayer (maveric149@yahoo.com) [050120 05:05]:
--- David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Is there anyone on this list with serious objections to short (12hr or 24hr) blocks for personal abuse? I'd like to see what can be done about the objections to the idea, with the hope of getting it through again.
I would support that. As is, our no personal attacks policy has little by way of teeth to it. The only problem, and this is a big one, is what constitutes a personal attack? Use of profanity in a provocative way is an obvious criteria, but there are *many* ways a person can demean another person without resorting to base language.
I recall Mr-Natural-Health deleting any questioning of his edits or edit summaries as a "personal attack".
What do you do when you come across a complete piece of trash article or edit? Criticizing something like that, even when it is justified, may be seen as a personal attack by the author.
"On Wikipedia, you are in fact required to suffer fools a little bit, of not gladly."
So we must tread a fine line here due to the subjective nature of the offense. RfC may be a way for the community to quickly decide the less than clear cases. A short term poll could be held on someone's RfC page to see whether or not that person violated the 'no personal attacks' policy. If <75% agree, then that person gets blocked for a small period of time (24hrs to a week; anything longer would need an ArbCom ruling).
Sounds like quickpolls ...
I understand that temporary injunctions by ArbCom were supposed to help with this, but, ironically, in more cases than not the final rulings are brought down before any temporary injunctions get the necessary votes.
This is one thing we're trying to get better with!
We could lower the vote threshold for temp injunctions. My original idea was to use the same criteria we use to open and close cases - just 4 yes votes needed.
That's a *very* good idea. What do we do to change ArbCom powers in this manner?
- d.