QUOTE(Lar @ Sat 22nd March 2008, 10:50pm)
But, I thought this thread was about deletion? I've spoken out on BLP-Lock about that, I made rather a radical proposal, in fact.
Presumably you're referring to
this proposal...
But you see the sort of mindset we've been up against, don't you? This is the entire reason Wikipedia is called a "cult" and a "hivemind." It
attracts people who think and operate this way:
QUOTE(User:Happy-melon @ March 22, 2008)
If you are seriously considering placing a quarter of a million Wikipedia articles under indefinite full protection, then this proposal is even more misguided than I initially realised. "Radical" is not the word I would have used: I would have used "fundamental" - Wikipedia simply will not be the same place if 15% of its pages can't be edited...
...when, of course, you had suggested nothing of the sort. All you'd written was that the proposal "wasn't about" the handful of BLP articles currently under dispute, but the other 250,000 that could
potentially be under dispute. Nowhere did you suggest that all 250,000 articles should be placed under full protection immediately, and yet this is the reaction you got.
And the problem is compounded by Wikipedia's "civility" rules. You're not allowed to tell
User:Happy-melon that he's a brainless moron with the attention span of a gnat, incapable of reading past the first three or four words of something someone else has written before immediately clicking WP's equivalent of a "Reply" button to tell everyone else how wrong they are and how right he is.
This is the sort of person you should be banning from the site, never to be allowed back in ever again.
This is the sort of person whose arrogance, narcissism, officiousness, and general lack of brain capacity consistently brings Wikipedia into disrepute among academics and journalists, and as we're seeing, an increasing percentage of everyone else.
As long as people like that exist, they'll be attracted to a website that feeds their egotism and narcissism with each and every "edit," and because of that you'll always have this problem. And not only will it not go away,
it will get worse, because these are the people who drive everyone else out.