Sorry, no. I am not going to try to change the policy. Rather, when a case comes before the arbitration committee that consist of nothing more substantial than name-calling, I will recuse myself. Vandalism, yes. Explicit threats, yes. Edit wars, yes. Insults? You're not paying me enough to tell people not to be hostile or rude. I'd rather relieve Sisyphus for a millennium or two. My characterization is "illogical"? Non-sequitur -- I'm not a Vulcan. "Condescending"? You're absolutely right. After all, my /six-year-old/ doesn't need my help to handle simple name-calling. -- Sean Barrett | Some days it just isn't worth preparing sean(a)epoptic.com | the environmental impact statement.

On Friday 23 January 2004 05:51 pm, Sean Barrett wrote: So what you're saying is that you don't want to enforce [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]]. So who will enforce this rule? As I have stated before, we should either enforce our rules or stop paying lipservice to them and scrap them. I question your suitability for the role of arbitrator based on your condescention towards those who want the wikipedia policies enforced. We have made the choice that it is preferential to have policies concerning etiquette. The primary reason for this choice is the fact that valuable contributors will be driven away by people who grossly violate common decency. I care enough about wikipedia to keep haggeling with people on these mailing lists to enforce policies that are beneficial to wikipedia. Personally, I act on gross violations of etiquette by ignoring the people who engage in such behaviour. I believe that the persons who wrote policies such as "no personal attacks" believe, as do I, that not everyone reacts to gross violations of etiquette as your "/six-year-old/" and I do. Retaining valuable contributors with a thin skin is why enforcement of rules such as "no personal attacks" is indeed a good idea. The only argument you have given against enforcing such rules is that your time is too precious. So would it be correct to conclude that you either you think that nobody will be driven away by personal attacks, or it is not worth your time to retain these contributors? I will also put to you my opinion that in cases where there has been a gross violation of policies such as "no personal attacks", all the arbitration committee will have to do is the following: 1. Verify the veracity of the claim that a policy was grossly violated If (1) is found to be true, then either: 2.1 Inform the violator that if he/she should engage in such behaviour again, they will be banned. Or, if the previous violations were found to have been sufficiently extreme: 2.2 Ban the violator I doubt that this proceedure would take too much time. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. Best, Sascha Noyes -- Please encrypt all email. Public key available from www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc

So just regularly not following policy is ok, so long as you're polite about it? Fred

On Friday 23 January 2004 07:06 pm, Delirium wrote: "No personal attacks on the Wikipedia, period. [...] Unlike the other rules, which are community conventions enforced only by our mutual agreement, this one may also be implemented in extreme cases as policy, i.e. grounds for banning that go beyond our traditional "sheer vandalism" threshold." The question is whether this is an extreme case. I agree with you that we shouldn't run around "throwing" everyone who has made a personal attack in front of the arbitration committee. But the above-quoted policy also states quite clearly that the policy "may also be implemented in extreme cases as policy, i.e. grounds for banning". Basically the same question as above; when are people "highly detrimental to wikipedia"? The current policy, by my interpretation, states that someone is highly detrimental to wikipedia if their personal attacks are extreme. Which is obviously far from a clear-cut answer. Your suggestion of assessing whether or not someone is likely to change their behaviour is, IMO, answered by my suggestion in the parent email under (2.1): A "last warning". In my opinion inferring the probability of future compliance from past behaviour is in most cases an unsatisfactory approach. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. Best, Sascha Noyes -- Please encrypt all email. Public key available from www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc

I think we need to consider what they destroy and how without consideration of what good things they have done. In other words, if some one is accused of destructive behavior, evidence that they wrote a good article or were polite in some other context is inadmissible evidence. After it is determined that we are dealing with someone who regularly transgresses, then as we consider remedies we might consider all the wonderful things they did. Fred

If a person drives other, equally (or more so) valuable users because of continued abuse, isn't that detrimental to the project? RickK Delirium <delirium(a)rufus.d2g.com> wrote: Sascha Noyes wrote: Well, I see a lot of our policies more as "you ought to do this" and "you ought not do this", rather than as "if you do (don't) do this you will be banned", which is a somewhat more strenuous pronouncement. Of course if we have no consequences the rules are meaningless, but I don't think we should be banning people simply for violating "the letter of the law", so to speak. Really we should only ban people who we've determined are highly detrimental to Wikipedia, combined with a determination that they're unlikely to change their behavior in the near future. In my opinion, anyway. -Mark --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it!

Rick wrote: My problem with this is that it's very unclear what is and is not Wikipedia policy. There are a lot of pages which purport to be policy, but some of them have been written by a single person and mostly ignored by everyone else, so at best can be called "one person's attempt at a proposed policy". There are some others that have some support, and multiple contributors, and still others than have a good deal of support. Then there are some procedural things, like VfD and the sysop-request process, that are de facto policy by virtue of the fact that they do what they say they'll do. But, apart from the fact that we strive for a "neutral point of view", I'm not aware of anything else that can be said to be "official policy", just a lot of things that have greater or lesser degrees of support as policy. For example, "no autobiographies" is a proposed policy with some support, but can't really be said to be official policy. "No personal attacks" likely has much more support, but I see it as quantitatively different rather than qualitatively--it should be given more weight since it has much more support, but none of our "policies" are really set in stone, since any of them can be modified at any time. In fact, the Wikiquette page was modified by User:168... just yesterday! So which version is official policy? The new one, or the old one? My answer would be neither--they're both proposed policies, with greater or lesser degrees of support. -Mark