QUOTE(Ottava @ Thu 6th May 2010, 12:35am)
QUOTE(Abd @ Thu 6th May 2010, 4:23am)
On the other hand, BLP is just an acronym for "Biography of a Living Person," and comments on a talk page aren't biographies. They can be libel, but the "L" in BLP isn't "Libel." You are sticking your foot deeper in your mouth. Start noticing the taste, maybe you can avoid it coming out the other end if you wake up quickly enough.
As I pointed out, someone like Lar can get away with it in a very blatant way while simultaneously making derogatory comments about lesser given to him. BLP, like CIVIL, NPA, etc, are just tools to beat people with in content disputes. It is the very definition of Battleground, but no one has the balls to block such people.
Those policies are that, but the only one using BLP that way, here, is you, Ottava, and you are doing it stubbornly and tenaciously. Whether you were or were not originally, you have become part of the Wikipedia Problem, definitely not part of the solution.
People like Lar might be part of the solution. My opinion is that it's probably too little, too late, but it remains a possibility that enough of the core might wake up and see what's been happening. My claim is that if the community organizes independently, it can become a force with the resources to turn Wikipedia around, to fulfill the original vision that inspired and then disappointed so many. The problem wasn't the vision, exactly, it's that it was simply incomplete.
The mission, to be sustainable and to not be a dangerous thing in itself, requires consensus process. The sense of the early wikipedians was that it was possible, and they were, in my opinion, right, but consensus process frequently does not naturally arise when the scale is large. It takes skill and experience and process. And it takes patience.
The standard excuse when someone is banned is that "the community has lost patience" with the editor. But a community does not truly lose patience unless every member loses patience, and what that really meant was that powerful individuals within the community lost patience. I saw numerous situations where individuals had lost patience and then prevented other editors from guiding or mentoring a problem editor. The community hadn't lost patience. Individuals had, and then, with their tools or influence, they enforced their own anger. And then, I have an example in mind, were elected to ArbComm, which then continued in the same vein, using coercive methods to maintain order, but without the caution and care and prudence to restrict coercion to necessity.
What's this thread about here? Many of the editors remaining at Wikipedia routinely act to block and ban or to urge this. And if anyone interferes with them, they attack that person, and I've seen this over and over. Lar was never a part of that. He's certainly "complicit" in what the community has been doing and he's done things that I would not defend, but I've never detected the all-too-common meanness in his actions, and it seems to me that his errors have been just that, errors, and it also seems to me that he's been ready to acknowledge that, continually.
Ottava, you could learn something from Lar, if you turn around. If the rest of Wikipedia were like him, there would not be a Wikipedia Problem, or, at least, it would be on a whole new level. You probably would not have been banned. You might have been warned or short-blocked for intemperate incivility, but that is simply the equivalent in normal process of the chair of a meeting ordering a member to sit down and shut up for the moment, ruling that their actions are out of order. And Wikipedia would have "chairs" who understood the true function of such facilitators.