[Wikipedia-l] Re: Ban warning to GrahamN

Mon Sep 9 10:33:38 UTC 2002

I was away from the computer all weekend, and now I'm reading this
thoughtful discussion carefully.

Bryan Derksen wrote:
> But what I'm objecting to is a reluctance to use banning _after_
> those other strategies have failed, which means that disruptive
> people who are immune to those other strategies (the merciless
> editing and ignoring you mention below) _do_ "get away with
> everything" because there's nothing else we can do to stop them.

I think this argument has merit.

I am opposed, politically speaking, to the death penalty.  My reasons
don't have much to do with the morality of doing away with some people
-- I think it's perfectly moral in some cases.  My reasons have to do
more with the rather alarming rate of erroneous convictions.

But I do support the death penalty in a handful of unique sorts of
cases.  If someone is already in prison for life, then there's not
much in the way of possible deterrent unless the death penalty is an
option.  And the odds of error are very low in such a case.

I say this only by way of loose analogy and support for the idea that
banning _is_ a serious penalty, to be entered into only after much
effort is put into other means.  But it cannot be ruled out entirely,
or there is ultimately no "stick" behind other things.

Someday we will meet someone with perl skills and no interest at all
in working with the group.  This person will set a cron job to insert
their nonsense into some subject pages, on a regular basis.  We
_could_, of course, always just revert their changes every time.  And
they can just increase the frequency of the cron job from weekly to
daily to hourly to every 5 minutes.

We don't have to put up with that.  Banning, pagelocks, etc., are
valuable tools for dealing with a situation like that.

The instant case is relevant, too.  We have a contributor (Helga) who
has been unable, so far, to improve her contributions.  So far, in
discussions here, she has been purely defensive and repeats her
allegations (while simultaneously denying them!) that people are
trying to censor.

At some point, the cost in terms of loss of diversity is much much
lower than the cost in terms of lost time on the part of others.

--Jimbo