[Wikipedia-l] Lir and Christopher Columbus

[Sean Barrett]

Larry, weigh in directly against me; I'm the first who wondered aloud
whether a one-hour ban might help.  I will only point out that it is the
first time I have ever proposed a ban, and I don't think a single
occurance should be called a "habit."

Did you follow the battle with Lir through all the various talk pages?
On the VANDALISM IN PROGRESS page, Lir accused Zoe of "defacing the
Columbus page, probably due to some form of inherent racism against
Africans and Amerindians."  Lir has no comprehension of NPOV, utterly
refuses to compromise, rejects even proposals that I consider absurdly
accomodating, and insists on entirely unsubstantiated historical
revisionism.

--
 Sean Barrett
 sean at epoptic.com

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com
[mailto:wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com]On Behalf Of Larry Sanger
Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2002 08:05
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Lir and Christopher Columbus


I would like to weigh in here to say that I'm just slightly disturbed
that
we are getting into the habit of publicly proposing, on this list, to
use
the banning power to settle acrimonious edit wars.  I've noticed this in
the case of Lir and of DW.  When Jimbo and I were the only ones who had
the authority to ban people, we never used it for this purpose, or at
least, I can't remember a single case.  This is the first time I recall
anyone proposing to ban someone for *one hour* so that the person could
"cool off."  This is the first I've heard of "cooling people off" as a
reason to *ban* them for any length of time.

If I could see immediately that Lir were simply a *vandal*, I could
understand.  But I do not see that Lir is simply a vandal, whatever
his/her merits.

Like everybody, I totally understand :-) the frustration involved in
working with people I regard as unreasonable, difficult, and even
trollish.  But banning them isn't the way that, up until just the last
month or two, we have dealt with them.

Let me be clear here (it's so easy to be misunderstood): on the one
hand,
I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with outright banning an IP
number (if it's stable) or perhaps, temporarily, a block of IP numbers,
if
it's perfectly clear that the person being banned is just a vandal.  On
the other hand, I do not think we should ban people who appear to be
making a good faith effort to contribute, unless we have gone through a
long public process and ensured that the bar is set very high.

In particular, we do not ban people for merely failing to follow the
"rules," even rules like [[netiquette]].  At least part of the point of
making the first rule "ignore all rules," I thought, is the notion that
we
all understand that we aren't going to *enforce* these rules except in
the
most egregious cases, which Lir and DW aren't, as far as I can tell.
For
non-vandals, the bar has to be set really, really high, I think.

--Larry

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