[WikiEN-l] Abusive editors

Wed Mar 9 17:36:30 UTC 2005

Charles Matthews wrote:

>Indeed.  Why dice with death and take the moral low ground in revert wars,
>when there is the more satisfying approach of the uber-troll: get yourself
>personally-attacked on the Talk page, and get your opponent (if briefly)
>thrown off the wiki?

Perhaps Charles is being facetious.  But if this is a serious position that 
anyone holds, I must express my profound opposition to this approach.

I do not believe that those editors who care about the quality of the 
content of articles -- that is, all editors -- should have to wait, or 
stoop to manipulating another editor, until the other editor makes a 
personal attack, to then get that editor thrown off Wikipedia.

We should not be relying on the no personal attack policy as a way of 
enforcing quality content.

If an editor is obstructing improvement of the article, or is damaging the 
article, we need an effective mechanism to deal with that problem, directly.

Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701