Fred Bauder wrote:
So just regularly not following policy is ok, so long
as you're polite about
it?
Well, not _ok_, but I think it has to be pretty egregious to warrant a
ban, which is a pretty severe sanction and should be the last resort.
Note that I'm not commenting on the particular cases that have come up
recently, which may very well be of the severe-enough-to-ban sort; just
commenting generally. Perhaps it's a personal opinion, but I think we
ought to strive to be as open and accomodating as possible, and avoid
banning as much as possible, since that's basically a "we give up, this
person cannot work within Wikipedia" decision. Several previous
conflicts have been resolved somewhat more satisfactorily--for example,
partisans on both sides of the Polish vs. German names dispute have
engaged in some anti-policy activity (name-calling, revert wars, etc.),
but have also contributed a great deal of useful information to the
Wikipedia, and seem eventually to have been persuaded to act more in
line with our policies. I think if we had simply banned a few of them
that would've been a quicker but overall worse solution.
-Mark