[WikiEN-l] Badsites meets RFA meets... RfC

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 3 Jun 2007 at 17:11:38 -0500, "Slim Virgin" <slimvirgin at gmail.com> 
wrote:

> On 6/3/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> > [[User:Ptmccain]] seems to be another victim of this.
> 
> Dan, with respect, I'd advise you to review all the diffs carefully
> before posting further. It will take you awhile, but you'll see for
> yourself that what you're saying is demonstrably false and misleading.

I've already apologized for my earlier confrontational tone and 
failure to assume good faith.  I'll try from now on to stick to facts 
and logical opinions, not assumptions and grudges.

Nevertheless, and even after looking at more materials on that 
particular user, I still think his permanent ban was an overreaction. 
Yes, he made some mistakes (in some ways similarly to the user that's 
on self-RFC now), but he's also done lots of productive contributions 
(including contributing many freely-licensed images), and was clearly 
not a troll or a sockpuppet.  He's just one of several users who 
wandered into a heated dispute and ended up touching the third rail 
of Wikipedia politics, which is to do anything that can (by assuming 
bad faith) be construed as being on "the same side" as the banned 
troll WordBomb.  If you assume good faith instead, his actions (which 
included restoring a set of talk comments that included not only a 
message from a sockpuppet of the banned user, but also a response 
from Fred Bauder that seemed supportive of that user's claims in this 
instance... so it can easily be construed as constituting an admin's 
warning which is improper to remove from a talk page) had a 
reasonable explanation that didn't necessarily involve enabling 
trolling.

Even an evil troll can be right sometimes, and it's wrong to kill the 
messenger who points that out.

-- 
== Dan ==
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