[Foundation-l] Growth vs. maintenance

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/7/2009 12:44:42 PM Pacific Standard Time, 
andreengels at gmail.com writes:


> No, we don't. We need forces to help the encyclopedia get further. We
> don't need a force of people who stop people who are helping creating
> it, and we don't need a force of people who support people who are not
> helping creating it.>>

You are completely ignoring what I said.
Police do not help the work move forward.  Police never help any progress 
progress.  Their only function is to stop something, not to make anything 
occur.

You are labeling all those blocked as being vandals.  That is begging the 
question.  The very point, is that many of those blocked, perhaps even most 
of them, did *not* deserve it at all.  Appealing to another admin is 
pointless, all admins support each other in the same way that all police support 
each other.  It's called a Police State.  That is what the term implies.  That 
is what we have in the project.  The fact that many people can work just 
fine within a Police State is not the same as saying that such a situation is 
ideal or even matches the real world.

In the real world, we do not run society at the whim of the police.  
Stating that people can appeal to ArbCom is fairly silly.  We are discussing 
trying to get people to become involved in the project.  Not trying to teach them 
how to run power games in a massive RPG.  That is the exact opposite of 
what I had hoped we were trying to do.  If the entire project is a game then 
we've failed.  If we are forcing people to learn all the gamer rules just to 
get their points considered, then we've failed.  If we have a sink or swim 
mentality for all new contributors then we've failed.

That's my point.  A vanishingly tiny number of admins ever seek out and try 
to help people who are blocked.  Everyone is guiltly until they prove their 
own innocence in a system which frowns on anyone trying to do so.  That's 
not the type of society that the majority of people want to live under.  And 
yet that's the type we've created.  Anyone who has tried to learn how to win 
under this sort of oppression in-project knows exactly what I'm speaking 
about.  I'm not sure that any admin would understand it.  That's a given.  
It's hard to show the police that a police state is a bad thing.  That's why we 
in the real world have checks against police abuse.

What I'm saying is that we need the exact same type of checks in the 
project.

You had said previously that when this "Community Approval" was tried, 
every block was challenged.  Yes.  Every person blocked is going to say "I'm 
innocent".  You see it on death row as well.  No criminal is ever guilty.  But 
to presume that somehow that's not what we want, is to say that the real 
world, in which we all live, is not what we want.  That what we want is 
criminals to behave nicely and not complain about the quality of food in prison. 
And for those falsely locked up, to just serve their term and have no 
"Innocence Project".  I disagree.

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.  And that proof should not rest 
in the arms of a sole person as it does in our project.  In our project a 
person can be locked up indefinitly with no trial, and no appeal.  And you 
wonder why people get disenchanted.

Will Johnson