[WikiEN-l] Dealing with AOL over vandalism

Sat Aug 30 21:12:39 UTC 2003

--- Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:
> While I doubt that this idea will go anywhere, I figured I'd weigh
> in 
> against it anyway.

I'm listening.

> First of all, the whole idea is somewhat ridiculous.  AOL is the
> single 
> largest ISP in the United States, providing internet access to
> millions 
> of people, including quite a few of our better contributors. 

I'm with you so far.

> Blocking 
> it would be incredibly counter-productive, and do far more damage
> than 
> Michael could possibly do.

Arguably so.

It only takes one or two really tenacious little vandals to piss off
and demoralize many good contributors.

  Furthermore, it is unlikely to receive
> *any* 
> even remotely good publicity, regardless of what publicity blitz
> you put 
> on.  It will receive good publicity on slashdot, in NANAE, and
> other 
> similar internet-zealot locations, but universally bad press 
> everywhere.  Wikipedia will essentially be painted as an elitist 
> internet-zealot organization that doesn't allow common folk in,
> while 
> we'd like to be painted as a bit more open than that.

Agreed.

>..to allow sysops to ban logged-in users if they
> are 
> currently on an AOL IP (then Michael could simply be banned by any
> sysop 
> each time he pops up by clicking the "ban" button).  However, even
> this 
> I'd prefer not to have, given that other solutions are possible 

> (my preferred so far being extending rollback to support rolling
back page moves).

That would be great, and it would be great regardless of Michael and AOL.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com