[WikiEN-l] Re: Banned users

Tue May 31 20:42:15 UTC 2005

>Message: 1
>Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 00:27:47 -0400
>From: Phil Sandifer <sandifer at sbcglobal.net>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <6E61B93E-C5B9-4FE1-8191-DC6C2BD1FE0C at sbcglobal.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

>Oh for god's sake.

>The technical evidence against Cranston is a slam dunk. He's a troll.
>He's a vicious, sockpuppeting troll who uses sockpuppets to try to
>generate fake consensus. He's the sort of user we routinely shoot on
>sight, and it's a good thing we do, because we have too damn many of
>them, and every time one manages to generate the headache that this
>has become, good users get driven off. Kudos to every admin who
>blocked him, everyone who called for his removal from this list, and
>everybody who tried to shut this mess down.

Oh, sure. Gun down the barbarians from the windows of our railroad train
out of laziness. In cold blood, too. Is this ethical? Sure, it's the
convenient thing to do. But it's kinda lazy, and, besides, some folks like
to have vandalish fun. Let 'em. Sure, it might mean more work for those of
us who staff Wikipedia, but, let's face it, we all have a prankstering
vandal under our tough, matter-of-fact, researching, teaching exteriors.
That being said, there ARE cases in which trolls should be banned, such as
when they go on the warpath against other Wikipedians, or pull
hard-to-undo crap such as deleting pictures or stuff like that.

>As for those who want to plead for more leniency and say that people
>were dismissive of him, wake up. This project is huge. Huge projects
>attract idiocy. They attract idiocy of the page vandal sort, and
>idiocy of the far more insidious sort. People who come to the project
>for their own ego, people who come to the project to advance their
>own agendas, and people who want to cause the project harm and who
>are actually good at doing it.

So? It's mainly the folks who want to harm our project - and the folks who
are good at harming our project - who ought to be banned, obviously. Other
idiocy can be dealt with by editing, or invoking the 3RR rule (temporary
bans), or other stuff like that.

>This doesn't mean we don't welcome new users. It doesn't mean we
>treat everybody with suspicion. But it means that we learn to call a
>spade a spade, and we stop feeling bad about coming down like a ton
>of bricks on people who are disrupting the project. We do not need to
>care why. We need to be willing to make social decisions with the
>same dispassionate "What will make this situation better" eye that we
>handle our articles with. If a user is breaking articles and making
>it so people can't edit, we shoot them.

Ahem. If a user is breaking articles, give him or her a pause to catch his
or her breath. If he or she is making it so folks can't edit, THEN we
should shoot. We should be fair to both Wikipedians and Wikipedia.

>That's it. That's all that's going to work. If we do not learn to
>come down on Cranstons with fury and speed, over time, this community
>will implode. One need only look at nearly every other Internet
>community to figure that one out.

Umm, okay, especially if the "Cranstons" are here to be trolls, and not to
be constructive. Bear in mind, however, that many of us probably do like
to contribute to BJAODN now and then.

>Good job David. Good job SlimVirgin.

>-Snowspinner

If the banned user deserved to be banned, then, yeah, I agree. Did the
banned user deserve to be banned? I dunno.

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