On 6/8/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/8/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Watching this interchange, I was wondering exactly how valid the claim was that (for example) the signature refactoring complaintants were "social Wikipedians" who might fall under the "go away" clause.
That's a straw man. The problem is not one of people but of a class of behavior.
And, of what are appropriate responses to that class of behavior.
The straw man argument you were floating seems to have been, that everyone doing this type of behavior should be told to go away.
My response is, now that we have some data, are you sure that you want to drive away a bunch of multi-thousand edit, apparently positive contributors for every actual problem child case you actually get in the signature cleanup effort?
Jimbo asks earlier whether we're really driving away good editors, as a data point he'd like to see. My point here is that your attitude, that everyone displaying some of these problem symptoms should go away, would result in driving away over 50% good editors.
The class of behavior is made up of individual people. If you're really sure that you want to drive away all those individual people, even if most of them are apparently strong contributors, then I object and see a problem.
The solution has to be behavior modification, not exile, for the vast majority of these "problems".
Whether some people who are predominantly just doing social stuff should be encouraged out the door or not if behavior modification fails is a different issue. But that's 1/7 of the first set of people you were refactoring sigs on.