[Wikipedia-l] Lir and Christopher Columbus

[Stephen Gilbert]

Thank you Larry. That sums up my feelings on bans
nicely.

Stephen G.

--- Larry Sanger <lsanger at nupedia.com> wrote:
> 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
> 
> [Wikipedia-l]
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