[WikiEN-l] Abusive editors

Wed Mar 9 17:08:00 UTC 2005

David Gerard said:
>
> [[Wikipedia:Blocking policy/Personal attacks (old)]] has the vote. The
> vote came out 36 for, 26 against, 5 neutral - simple majority, but not
> enough of one to indicate consensus. As far as I can tell, the
> objections are that it's too subjective.
>
> The instructive recent case of Skyring versus Adam Carr (a coupla
> messages ago) shows one obvious hole: Skyring belittling or ignoring
> all attempts at reason until the editor attempting to reason with him
> blows his top at the intransigent POV-pusher.

This is the killer for me.  Some people have lower boiling points than
others and can easily be provoked.  Enforcing "No personal attacks" by
blocking throws those, relatively vulnerable people into the firing line
of the subtler trolls.  I support "Remove personal attacks" as a
reasonable way of dealing with personal attacks. Although it's equally
subjective, it's open and accountable and throws the onus on the person
perceiving a personal attack while making it hard for such attacks to
derail discussion.