[WikiEN-l] No more blocking people for who they *are*?

Delirium delirium at hackish.org
Tue Feb 7 23:58:03 UTC 2006


W. Guy Finley wrote:

>What is staring to kill me is that people feel hey have a RIGHT to edit
>Wikipedia.  Editing Wikipedia is a privilege and if you demonstrate you're a
>dolt and can't handle that then there should be no question your ability to
>edit should be revoked for a set period of time or indefinitely.  We're
>talking about a user here who's vast majority of time has been spent putting
>all the "funny" boxes on his user page and embarrassing the good name of a
>rock and roll legend.
>  
>
I don't think anyone is arguing that there is a fundamental right to 
edit Wikipedia.  Rather, the claim is that Wikipedia's mission of 
writing a neutral, high-quality encyclopedia is not well served by 
excessive policing of users to cull the ones who express opinions deemed 
"embarrassing".  It seems more useful to limit banning to the cases 
where a user is actually disrupting the process of writing an 
encyclopedia, e.g. by edit-warring or spamming.

-Mark




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