[WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

Mon Feb 17 01:49:49 UTC 2003

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>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.
>
This is really just a difference in perspective.  Whereas I was 
approaching this from the perspective of the article, it appears that 
you are appraoching it from the perspective of the contributing vandal. 
 Of course it's ridiculous to try to imagine someone as "semi-banned". 
 Once he's banned, that's it.  It's pointless to speculate about what he 
might have done if he were allowed to continue.  

If the comment that women are more prone to anorexia were added to an 
article where it at least has a modicum of relevance, a person watching 
this article who otherwise might not have crossed paths with our vandal 
could easily see the unexplained removal of that comment as being itself 
vandalism.

Eclecticology