[Wikipedia-l] Re: Reciprocal system...

Sun May 26 21:58:09 UTC 2002

On Sunday 26 May 2002 12:01 pm, : lcrocker wrote:
> There's no real conflict; there's one anonymous crackpot with a
> pet theory, and the rest of the reasonable community.  The crackpot
> doesn't even /try/ to follow our guidelines here--he simply wants
> to make that article an advertisement for his pseudoscientific
> bullshit, and when we try to make a useful article out of it, he
> just restores his crap.  I don't think we should "lock" the article,
> but only because that prevents other reasonable people from editing
> it.  I /do/ think we should ban the crackpot if he doesn't give up.
>
Hum, I don't know about banning his IP; that seems to be a drastic measure 
given that the "crackpot's" focus is on a single page. However, I think we 
should at least try to make his version closer to NPOV by editing it and 
placing in appropriate qualifiers. Such as; "Larson says X, however working 
scientists in the field say Y."  The protection on the page has been lifted 
and Doug has already been warned <not> to simply replace the current version 
with his own. We should consider a ban <If> and <only> if, he reverts the 
article again. Otherwise I think we should at least try to make his version 
more NPOV. 

> In general, though, I think we should not make hard-and-fast rules
> about use of sysop features.  We should use judgment, and do whatever
> is good for the project.  A content war between reasonable people
> who disagree is one thing, and we should treat such a conflict with
> respect.  But a crackpot spreading total nonsense is another, and we
> should use whatever tools we have to defend against his damage.

Well since I was the one who protected the page, I guess I have to agree with 
you Lee. ;) Actually, I totally agree with you - within the context of a 
general framework, we should be able to exercise case-by-case judgement as to 
when we use our sysop powers to do what we feel is the best <for the good of 
the project.>.

With that said, I do think that a slightly different protocol for protecting 
pages needs to be devised (otherwise the question would not have been posed 
in the first place). Should we bother the list with requests for protecting 
particular pages? If so, then it would also make sense to bother the list to 
ban IPs since I feel this is even a more drastic measure than <temporarily> 
protecting a page. However, a lot of damage can be done during the delay.... 
This may not be as much of an issue with protecting a single page though 
(since it can just be restored later). On the other hand, others may make 
valid edits to the POV version inputed by a troll which causes versioning 
issues that would have to be worked-out later. My view, is that the sysop 
doing the protecting should list the reasons why on the talk for the page and 
the lock should be limited in duration (unless it is on the main or one of 
the policy pages). It would also be nice to have a comment field on the 
protection page and and an easy to find log of 'who has protected what' and 
why. 

In this particular case, I looked over the edit history of the page, and read 
both the talk and old talk. After that, it was my personal <judgement> that 
Doug's actions bordered on vandalism since he was replacing an agreed upon 
version with his own biased one. But I did not feel that it would at all have 
been appropriate to consider banning his IP <because> his actions were only 
directed at a single page. This may have been an error in judgement on my 
part since this had the effect of not allowing <anybody> but sysops to edit 
the page (it would be nice to have the ability to limit certain classes of 
contributors from editing a protected page - <only> blocking non-logged-in 
users would have worked in this case). All I wanted to do was to force a 
truce in order to stop the version war <so that> a compromise could be 
reached.

I could have <easily> protected the page and not tell anybody about it. 

PS PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE lets limit this discussion so that we can discuss 
the FAR more interesting ideas on beta/stable. I fear that this will become a 
red herring and trump that discussion...

maveric149   