[WikiEN-l] RK temp-banned

Thu Oct 2 23:08:23 UTC 2003

Jimmy-
> It seems likely that he's angry enough to never come back anyway, in
> which case we can all just talk about how to best avoid this sort of
> thing in the future.

Ban faster? :-)

Seriously, I don't see how you can avoid dealing with problematic persons,  
and I don't see how the persons attacked by RK should have acted any  
differently, and I still think that a temporary ban was the best action in  
this case. There are some people who believe that I am somehow working on  
a grand strategy to usurp power on Wikipedia, which is kind of funny,  
because the first thing I would do it if I had it is democratize  
everything ;-).

We should avoid developing too much of a behavioral double standard. RK  
was tolerated because he contributed good material. But how much good  
material has not been contributed because of his well documented  
behavioral problems? In my opinion, we need to set clearer rules on  
Wikiquette and be serious about enforcing them, with a well-defined  
protocol of warning, temporary banning, permanent banning etc. Maybe there  
could be a 5-10 member Wikiquette "committee" where violations could be  
reported and decisions would be made by voting. By making it proprietary  
(totally unwiki, but so is reporting directly to you) we can avoid having  
the lists and talk pages cluttered up with these complaints and can make  
sure that users will not have to fear repercussions for reporting  
Wikiquette violations.

Implementation wise, this could be a mailing list with non-member posting  
rights (perhaps with a web-based submission interface to avoid spam --  
this could actually be done inside Wikipedia by creating a fake user with  
that email address and using the "Email this user" feature, how about  
[[User:Mediator]]?). Right now, it's really difficult for users to deal  
with insults and personal attacks. I would love to be able to say in 5-10  
years that the discussion climate on Wikipedia is the best anywhere on the  
Internet.

Regards,

Erik