Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On 3/15/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I find Jimbo's actions on [[en:Justin Berry]] so disturbing. I have no problems banning a user (either entirely, or from certain types of articles) if they can't edit neutrally; I have no problems reverting their non-neutral edits and removing inaccurate/slanted information; and so on. A blanket prohibition on any text ever touched by the user being in the article, though---even going so far as to insist that their neutral contributions be independently rewritten by someone else---seems to be a bit of a witch-hunt. Is there a legitimate reason for it besides fear that some jackass in the media is going to say "lol wikipedia lets pedophiles edit articles relating to pedophilia"? Self-identified Satanists who've edited [[en:Satanism]] had better hope the U.S. media doesn't have a recurrence of its 1990s moral panic over Satanism!
Not a very good comparison, that; how about, say, self-identified members of Stormfront editing [[Simon Wiesenthal]]?
Which is not to say that it would be completely impossible for them to edit that article in a neutral fashion. But AGF doesn't mean being hopelessly naive; when the presumption of ulterior motives -- and highly malicious ones, at that -- is so strong as to require that even superficially neutral and well-referenced edits be exhaustively verified, it seems easier for everyone just to not have the individual editing the article in question at all.
Why is it not a good comparison? There are many people who would argue that Satanists are no better than Stormfront members (possibly worse, if you believe the network-TV exposes on "satanic cults").
If indeed an individual keeps making superficially neutral edits that turn out not to be, then I would favor banning them---but *because of that*, not because they happen to be a neo-Nazi, or a pedophile, or a Satanist, or whatever the moral-panic-du-jour is.
-Mark