[Wikipedia-l] What if a signed-in user started writing thefollowing...

[Mark Christensen]

> I doubt many people would ask such questions; I mean, such a 
> person would be beneath contempt and therefore not 
> particularly interesting as a subject of such speculation.

I know this is all hypothetical, and that "beneath contempt" is a stock
phrase, but I am strongly opposed to holding anyone "beneath contempt."


As far as I am concerned contempt is a part of the problem, not part of
the solution.  

Let's take a brief example. As I understand it Helga deserved the
oportunity to make her case as best she could, and we had a
responsibility to take her seriously, to look at her case and ask the
right questions, and offer her an opportunity to learn to work with us.
And then later, when that failed, we had a responsibility to ask her to
leave.   We had this responsibility because she was not respecting
others in the community by: refusing to take seriously questions about
the credibility of her sources, insulting a number of core contributors,
and disregarding core policies like the NPoV.    

One of the ways that we can better respect people in our community is to
set out clear rules, and to enforce those rules.  I personally think
there is a lot more which can be done using social pressures (so called
SoftSecurity) rather than technological means (a banning feature of the
hardware), but I don't think we can afford the pie-in-the-sky attitude
that banning, page freezes, etc. will always be unnecessary. 


Yours
Mark Christensen