[WikiEN-l] Arbitration progress report #2

Sat Jan 24 00:06:19 UTC 2004

Sascha Noyes 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. 
>  
>
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