--- "James D. Forrester" james@jdforrester.org wrote:
Are you saying that the ArbComm should be amoral?
Hmm. Did you mean "amoral with respect to the participants' nature", or "amoral with respect to the participants' activities on Wikipedia"? It rather changes the question, and my answer to it...
Oops, yes it was ambiguous. I meant amoral with respect their activities on Wikipedia. I do agree with your theoretical comments about Hitler and Mother Theresa. I was more worried about situations that might occur like the following (completely made-up, honest!):
User A gets into conflict with User B. Both behave *equally* badly, breaking various policies and just being gits in general. However, User A is also an outstanding scholar and prolific contributor of high-quality content, whereas User B only pops in every now and then for some light editing (and mostly outside of the main article space to boot). User A hints darkly that, if sanctioned, she would quit the project for good. A pragmatic, amoral ArbComm might be tempted to place heavier sanctions on User B than User A, even though that would be (morally speaking) unfair, because User A is evidently more valuable to the project than User B.
-- Matt
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
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