[WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

Sat Feb 15 13:36:13 UTC 2003

Ray Saintonge wrote:
>  Most of what these people write is nonsense 
> or offensive, and is justifiably deleted.  If, however, in some rare 
> instance our same vandal happened to write something meaningful and 
> useful, there is no reason why that particular bit of writing should be 
> deleted out of spite. Each contribution should be judged on its own merits

I disagree in most cases.  There must be flexibility, of course.
However, it is not *just* pointless and stupid for us to look at every
edit of the MIT vandal and study whether it is NPOV or not.  It's
actually worse than that.

If we start treating him as "semi-banned", then he has strong
encouragement to keep coming back.  He knows that if he can write
something semi-plausible, he can trick us into debating it, discussing
it, and so forth.  That's a big mistake.

The best way to get rid of a vandal is to simply erase everything he
does immediately.

In the real world, the most effective anti-grafitti campaigns involve
simply cleaning it up as fast as possible.  It would only encourage it
to convene artistic committees to study the artistic quality of each
one to determine if it's an improvement.

--Jimbo