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Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
From Wiktionary: Mentor: 1. A wise and trusted counselor or teacher.
It's the Mentorship Committee, not the "Parole Officer Committee."
You know, this only works in the probationed editor actually wants to cooperate and improve. Many of them don't.
When a person messes up the first time, we try to explain to them what they did wrong so they can behave better in the future. If that doesn't work, we try again. And again. Eventually, it goes up to RFAr. To my mind, most people who made it all the way to RFAr and got a decision against them (a months-long, difficult and painful process) already had more than enough opportunities to reform. If being on probation still isn't enough, and they continue the bad behavior, they shouldn't be met with even more patience and understanding. I am happy that Wikipedia is so open, but I think this would be going too far.
Probation, then, serves as a blanket license to treat transgressions more harshly because of past history. It doesn't mean that the probationed editor is being granted a mentor to "teach" them the ways of the Wiki. It means "shape up or ship out" -- and as ugly as it is, there are some people who have to be dealt with this way, or we will never get anything done.
Ryan