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