Jimbo calls for global ban on Thekohser, and his bidding is done Options

[thekohser]

Jimbo must not like living in a trailer park. Seems he has a lot of pent up anger. I wonder what the specific crime was, to call for this today? It's gotta be the trailer park, right?

Kohs is permanently and globally banned from all Wikimedia projects.--[[User:Jimbo Wales|Jimbo Wales]] 04:04, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

This post has been edited by thekohser: Tue 4th May 2010, 1:37am

[Guido den Broeder]

Look upon this as a handy way to take stock of which projects still have some honest participants.

[Abd]

Look upon this as a handy way to take stock of which projects still have some honest participants.

Not an effective test unless you look over a much longer time span.

Guido and Greg, you are postponing the resolution at the Speakers page. I certainly know your position, but edit warring isn't the way to get it. Both of you now have made multiple edits to that page asserting the same content. I will allow myself one edit, and only one edit, and I'm not ready to assert it, because if I'm the only one (plus the two of you), it's a lost cause.

I don't think it's a lost cause. I think you are appropriate as a speaker, Greg, provided that it's known that you are a critic. And I think many others will agree. But the time to assert this is critical, the way the wikis work.

Look at the defrocking of Jimbo. What was really the same issue took place two months earlier, that RfC was started over Wikiversity. But who cared enough about Wikiversity?

I argued, then, that the Wikiversity community should organize itself, off-wiki, and make that organization inclusive, and design it to seek consensus, as well as to measure it. It would then be known if it was practical to challenge Jimbo or not, and, indeed, if the majority actually would support a challenge. The crucial issue would have been if there were enough editors willing to support a challenge who would also be willing to make a fork work. Because if you aren't prepared to fork, you don't have any real negotiating power except for a threat to abandon Wikiversity, which made most yawn.

But when an issue of, shall we say, broad interest, or interest in broads, or something like that, came up, lots of people looked at it and realized there was an issue of abuse of power. It wasn't just the porn, for sure, it was a very visible process of Jimbo trying to push a community around, and threatening admins, etc. Many wikis were affected, because of links to the deleted images from them. Did his apparent "success" at Wikiversity embolden Jimbo? I don't know. But in March, when Tango claimed that Jimbo wasn't foolish enough to defy an actual community consensus, Jimbo wrote that he was mistaken. He was, at that point, ready to fight.

Why did he change his mind? I'm sure there was a lot of back-channel communication, particularly between Jimbo and the Board. The Board was, I suspect, less than thrilled. They supported the "clean-up," but, well, I can imagine the reaction if some politician locally, here in the U.S., decided to "clean up" the city, and went into people's houses and confiscated whatever they thought was porn. If that's going to happen, it can't be done on a large scale. (It does happen, but on a much more modest scale, typically with actual child porn, found through due process search warrants. Not the Mayor of the town barging into homes.... Such a mayor would be quickly removed.)