Thank you Larry. That sums up my feelings on bans nicely.
Stephen G.
--- Larry Sanger lsanger@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
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