[WikiEN-l] Featured editors?

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com>:

> Joshua Zelinsky wrote:
>> Quoting "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan at tobias.name>:
>>> And it's a good thing the real-life authorities (not the Wikipedia
>>> authorities) got involved, since they actually have the ability to
>>> stop real-life stalking (like by jailing the stalker), something that
>>> Wikipedia is completely powerless to do.  Banning him from the site,
>>> while justified based on his actions, is pretty much useless for
>>> stopping his off-wiki activity.
>>
>> I don't understand what point you are attempting to make. Are you
>> attempting to argue that we should not have banned Amorrow?
>
> Banning is one thing, and in the case of willfully persistent
> vandals and trolls, I have no problem with it.  But we tend to
> tie ourselves up in knots trying to do more than that.  After
> we ban someone, they may keep harassing us from external sites.
> They may try to "out" our editors.  They may say some really truly
> not-nice things about us.  And there's *nothing we can do about it*.
> But that drives us INSANE, because what they're doing is *WRONG*,
> and we desperately want to *MAKE* *THEM* *STOP*!!!  So we try to
> ban links to their sites, and suppress any on-wiki discussion of
> anything about them or what they're saying, and block anyone who
> dares to try.
>
> It's not clear that any of that extra drama works.  It might
> be the case that, after banning them, we should do our best to
> utterly ignore them.  If they do something utterly unignorable,
> like stalking or harassing one of our editors in real life,
> we should turn the problem over to the real-world authorities,
> because unlike us and our website thingy, they *can* do something
> about it.

I don't think anyone is trying to advocate a return to BADSITES, so I 
don't see
what precisely the issue is here. And note that Dan's above comment was that
"Banning him from the site, while justified based on his actions, is pretty
much useless for stopping his off-wiki activity" so I don't think that's what
Dan was talking about anyways.