On Nov 27, 2007 9:34 PM, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/27/07, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com:
Now as I see it. A bad block was made. Admins make bad blocks all the
time.
There was a private list involved but that was incidental. The block was overturned and then there was way too much drama over the matter. We
have an
encyclopedia to edit. Can we go back to that now? Please?
One could hope, but a lot of us are genuinely afraid that trying to write an encyclopaedia is going to get us banned for various reasons, and would like to feel safe that we're not going to wake up banned as a sockpuppet of Wikipedia Review member X or whatnot. Secret evidence on secret mailing lists leading to blocks where the reasoning won't be discussed? Am I popular enough that if I got the block instead of !! that I'd get the necessary outrage to get me unblocked? I have my doubts ... and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Cheers WilyD
Exactly. All of us are. Which is why we are currently begging people to turn down the paranoia a bit. Yes, perhaps a banned editor is grooming an account for adminship. Those of us willing to think rationally can tell that the chances of the banned user in question not being recognised in the normal course of business combined with the ease of emergency desysopping an admin gone rogue mean that this is simply not something that we should be unduly terrified of; we certainly should not cause people who write articles to reconsider their level of involvement because of it. Instead, we are subject to this climate of paranoia. Nobody is comfortable when this kind of siege mentality develops. The outside opinion at the RfC that I quoted earlier demonstrates it. But I am yet to see a single acknowledgment that this stuff has gone too far.
RR RR