[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l digest, Vol 1 #777 - 11 msgs

[d3p1k at yahoo.com]

On Tuesday, October 22, 2002, at 03:27  PM, wikipedia-l-
request at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 15:06:41 -0700
> To: <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Less than an outright ban
> From: lcrocker at nupedia.com
> Cc:
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
>
>
>> Maybe we should revive the idea of a partial ban:
>> * Contributor blocked from editing articles -- stops the edit war
>> * But can still edit talk pages -- which keeps dialogue open
>
> On Wikipedia, we can't see whether the troublemakers are adults
> or not, so we give them the benefit of the doubt.  But some of them
> probably are, in fact, children.  It wouldn't surprize me a bit to
> discover that Lir is a very bright 14-year old.  Why should we
> bend over backwards to give such a person presumed rights here that
> even the most liberal of us wouldn't grant in real life?
>
> And since we can't know the physical age of someone here, it is
> perfectly reasonable for us to evaluate the /actual actions/ of
> of contributors, and to judge whether or not they have the maturity
> to work within this system. If someone acts like a 10-year-old,
> they should be treated like one.  A block isn't saying "you're an
> awful person" or anything--it's just saying "go to your room for
> a while, the grown-ups are talking".
>

That's a good point and a good analogy. I never considered that Lir 
might, in fact, be a kid. It was hard to imagine someone so belligerent 
would survive very well in university (I assumed she was student based 
on her thankfully now - forgotten Iowa State jag), but then again, I've 
been out of school for a while. Maybe things have changed.

Dave De Paoli