[WikiEN-l] Featured editors?

[Marc Riddell]

on 11/12/07 8:25 PM, Steve Summit at scs at eskimo.com wrote:

> 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*!!!

And this is exactly the type of reaction they are going for.

> 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's like a country building a missile defense shield - someone will simply
build a better missile.

> It might
> be the case that, after banning them, we should do our best to
> utterly ignore them.

YES! When a shout is met with silence, all that's left is the echo  -
ringing in the abuser's ears.

> 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.

Yes.

Marc Riddell