[WikiEN-l] /ban pages

Thu Aug 21 20:25:31 UTC 2003

I'm sending this just to wikien-l rather than wikipedia-l, but it's
sort of a close call.  It's just that I think (but correct me if I'm
wrong) that the custom of /ban pages is primarily an en: custom, not
followed elsewhere.

I'm generally opposed to the making of /ban pages as places to discuss
why a person should or should not be banned, and I hope that the
custom will soon fall out of favor.  The reason is that I think it
tends to make problems worse instead of better.

It puts people on the defensive, it is a personal attack on them, and
it raises the 'stakes' in disputes in such a way that peaceful
resolution is less likely rather than more likely.

If you need a place to catalog evidence, I'd recommend doing it
privately, on a file on your own computer.  When you've got a ton of
goods on someone, email it to me privately if you like.  Public
accusations tend to hurt feelings and leave permanent problems.  I do
respect confidences, so if you want to complain about something, hey,
I'm here.  It's what I do.

Publicly, it'd be fine to post that same evidence right on the
person's user_talk page, but phrased as kindly as you can possibly
stand.

For some jerks, it won't matter if you make a ban page or be nice to
them or what.  They'll just be jerks.  That's fine, just leave me a
nice clean paper trail of how everyone was nice and kind and this jerk
kept exploding or doing POV things.  Then a ban is uncontroversial.

But for some people, the ones who just didn't know how our culture
works, or the ones who are difficult personalities but willing to try
to keep themselves under control, I think a kinder approach will be a
lot more effective.

As an example of something that I really didn't like to see, someone
set up a page the other day where other people could vote on banning
someone.  Well, that's just going to anger them more, and anyhow, we
don't vote on bans anyway.  We never have, and if we were going to do
that, we'd have to have a huge discussion over the best way to do it,
etc.  There's a huge mess of thorns there.

In short, I'm asking (and this is a 'please' in the sense of a genuine
request, not a veiled command!) that we discontinue this practice.

--Jimbo