---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Daniel R. Tobias" dan@tobias.name To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:43:12 -0400 Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Cla68 blocked for asking question On 20 Oct 2007 at 20:48:48 -0700, "Steven Walling" steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Jimbo, at first glance my Portland liberal brain knee-jerk reacted to your comment about bringing back the WikiLove by thinking, "How? By simply blocking or banning anyone who can't agree with our vision and play nice? Seems rather in contrast to wiki values."
But then I thought about it, and that's exactly right. For a long time, civility and WikiLove have been rhetoric without any force behind them, or at least the force of a block. Perhaps it's time for admins to step up to the plate more when it comes to trolls who dance around the letter of the law to stick around.
Your first impression makes more sense to me. Love isn't something you can gain by force or threat of it. Fear, yes, and maybe compliance, but not love. Are you looking for a fake civility and feigned love that comes from everybody being afraid to openly show any other feelings for fear of sanctions? That would be like on the Twilight Zone episode where the mutant kid reads everybody's mind and makes people vanish or transform into things if he doesn't like what they're thinking, so everybody has to constantly think pleasant thoughts even though they really hate the kid's guts.
****** I don't hate the particular editor I blocked. Nothing personal. And in situations like this it's rather farfetched to ask for love. I can ask for civility and adherence to site standards, and when someone drives wedges into that I can use the tools. They may not construct love, but they do construct a space in which certain things don't happen - where Wikipedia is not a battleground, or a soapbox, or a lot of other things people would like to make of open edit capabilities. Wikipedia isnt anarchy either. We're an encyclopedia, and people who stray too far from that get a short block to think about it. If they're basically reasonable people they see that we mean it and adjust.
-Durova