[WikiEN-l] authority

Fri Jun 25 03:56:00 UTC 2004

> 1) Give up, let him have the Ronald Reagan article to write in his POV
> 2) Protect the article
> 3) Block him
> Can you think of another alternative?

While I agree with Martin Harper that there *were* other alternatives, and I
even tried one myself (qualifying the statement of prosperity as the
opinions of only some, which seems to have stuck), I think this is also a
good place for some type of mini-block.  Blocking a newbie like this from
just that single article, or even from all of the article-space, but not the
talk space and user talk space would have been much better.  In this case
perhaps it wasn't necessary, but it's quite likely that a new user might not
even find the talk space without a bit of direction.

In this case we had a persistant person who managed to find the mailing list
to discuss the problem, and that's fortunate.  But it would be nice if
blocked users could participate on at least a single page so that they had
some sort of public forum to discuss their block.

Finally, I'd like to say that looking at the edits it doesn't appear that
they were made in bad faith.  Yes, they could be characterised as POV, and
yes, the situation could have been handled much better by the blocked user.
But the situation could have been handled much better by a number of other
parties too.  Remember, no users, including administrators, have the right
to tell other users what to do or not do.  Admins should look at
[[Wikipedia:Administrators]] every once in a while, where it says that "
Sysops are not imbued with any special authority, and are equal to everybody
else in terms of editorial responsibility."  The new user without an account
has just as much of a right to tell a sysop to "please not...whatever" as
the sysop has to tell him or her.

Anthony