Discussion

It's like Discussion, y'all. Anything that you might want to draw attention to can be posted and commented upon here. For now, a central location for discussions is more viable than commenting in talk pages, where it may be easily overlooked. --Snickles 12:55, 20 May 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

Ban Length

• At User talk:Rottingflesh, we concluded a need of a concrete standard about editing others' talk. Discuss. --CG1:t,c,e 07:47, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
  • Is the talk really old? Is it completely misleading and inaccurate? I see nothing wrong with deleting that kind of stuff, even on talk pages. Maybe things could be archived for posterity, but not many people know how to do that. Also, I'm of the opinion that keeping around misleading and inaccurate stuff is just bad form. Modifying someone else's talk should first result in a standard warning on the offender's Talk page, simply stating that they should not modify other people's talk (unless it's old or useless?) This warning could probably link to the policy about editing talk pages, and resultant ban lengths. I understand that's a judgment call, and probably why the blanket "editing other people's talk is very frowned upon" is stated. I also think that any potential infraction should take into account how much the user helps the wiki and contributes. If it's a newbie, and they're just deleting old things, that would probably induce a larger penalty than someone that's been around a while, and has established that they are a helpful and knowledgeable editor. If they are warned, and continue to do it against a polite warning from a mod, then maybe a 1 day ban, to be like "we're not kidding. Stop it." then if they continue, a longer ban would be in order. --RoyalTonberry 08:05, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
    • 1. Though I'm in a large way responding to things from CG1's last post on RottingFlesh's talk page, this seems like a much better and still relevant venue for discussion. Not sure if all of these are relevant, but I'm not sure where better to mention them. Please redirect/relocate this to a more appropriate location if needed
      2. To me, a ban length of any amount of time (for a first offence in particular) is unwarranted when there are no policies being broken. CG1 said the the KolWiki tends to follow Wikipedia's guidelines, which is fair enough. But how is anyone to know that? I browsed through a bunch of pages today, and couldn't find that kind of info. What I see about discussion page editing: Established Standards doesn't have anything about talks, it just mentions that the page "assumes a basic knowledge of wiki editing." That page, under its "Discussion Pages" section, it says "Click on the "+" tab to add a new section, or edit the page in the same way as an article page. Use talk pages for questions, comments, or raw data." (bolding mine). That implies that deletion of comments is acceptable, no? Though, Help:Contents says this: "Also, editing or deleting other people's comments is generally not appreciated, although discussions may be archived." Not appreciating is a lot different than blocking, to me. Also, information about how one goes about archiving things is absent as well. The standards about editing talk are vague at best, nonexistent at worst. Maybe we should have a link to the wikipedia standards saying "when in doubt, refer to this"? If I were to go solely off what I've seen on the pages here, editing and deleting individual talk posts would seem okay - if sometimes questionable, depending on what's being removed - and definitely not worthy of time spent blocked. --Kirkpatrick 08:56, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
    • This wasn't a simple "deleting ancient talk and a horribly outdated page". I didn't bother reverting his blanking of the outdated page, you might notice. I didn't even realize that the page existed until he waltzed into it, and I could tell it was something in need of either deletion or a massive revamp. So I was fine with the idea of someone coming in with a rewrite ready to go. Not that that page needed blanking to make the incoming rewrite necessary; it was already tagged for one, actually. The problem was the way in which he did it. I see the Hogs have a general problem with realizing that they are not, in fact, the center of the (KoL) universe. Waltzing around and waving your wang about while professing your excellence and dominance does not make you a productive, helpful, or knowledgeable editor. It makes you an ass. Your arguments run something like this: "I told a woman that she was beautiful and smart. I did a nice thing.", all the while refusing to acknowledge that you were covered in shit and bashing her face in with a dead baby while you were doing it. That changes things quite a bit, even if you don't realize it. But I think I'm growing tired of feeding the trolls from the Hogs. We can work on a way to make certain policies more transparent, that much is well and good. I think there should never be an explicitly stated policy of "don't be an ass", however. That is understood by anyone in a public situation who isn't an incurable ass already. RF was banned for being an ass. And then banned some more for being a bigger ass. And if he persists, he'll likely be banned forever for being a known incurable ass. It's very simple. His cadre of clanmates who came in and went about putting in his rewrite without being an ass? They were not banned for being an ass; or anything else. They were being helpful, knowledgeable, useful editors. And I dislike playing favorites with ban lengths, too, at least not with this sort of infraction. You don't earn the right to be an ass. You don't earn the right to spam links to boot brands. You don't earn the right to turn a wiki page into your personal vanity site. Etc. etc. You do these things, and you get banned like anyone else; the length only goes up depending on your editing history (or lack thereof), not down. There are admins that make themselves available for contact should the banned party feel they should be unbanned or the like if they think they had that one-in-a-million situation to explain it away. --Flargen 14:24, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
• I see two things in need of clarification:
  1. What are reasonable guidelines for initially handing out a ban?
  2. What are reasonable ban durations for a given infraction?
• It's pretty common for wikis to use the principles of Wikipedia in their administration, but that needs to be noted somewhere, otherwise users cannot find said policies. In the case that started this, my personal view would have been to revert the change and give the user a talk page warning; it wasn't abject vandalism, even though it wasn't the way things should have been done. I also think a one month block after they came back was a bit much -- yes they were insulting, but a user's talk page is a user's talk page. If they want to delete things from it, they have the right to do so (since the comment is technically archived in the edit history). That's right from Wikipedia -- it's discouraged, but but is not in and of itself a bannable offense, in my opinion. So this is the thing: if you want to use wikipedia's policies and guidelines, then the admins have to be consistent with them. Even a personal attack deserves a warning followed by a short initial block at most. Banning should always be used as a last resort -- in practice it rarely works well when used as a "go sit in the corner" kind of punishment.
• So, if wikipedia's policies are going to be considered the 'de facto' policies here, it needs to be clearly stated as an established standard. Then, it needs to be followed. And any deviations from wikipedia should be noted in that standard. --Lordebon 14:49, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
  1. i would always counsel against making rules explicit, since rules make lawyers, and lawyers are assholes. leaving the whole "oh look douchebaggery, what should i do?" process up to the admins' discretion leaves no space for "but the rules say" nonsense.
  2. a stern typing to, or the threat of a ban? don't cut it. bans are pretty much all we got as far as punishment goes.
  3. making bans and the procedures of banning consistent by codification has the opposite effect to the one you propose: it just demands acres of text debating equivalence.
  4. since editing talk is such a douchebag thing to do (hey, look, i changed what you said and now i look smart and you look stupid hur hur) and the edge cases start so close to what would be otherwise be considered normal that a flat ban is the smartest and easiest for everyone.
  5. rottingflesh didn't get banned for editing talk. he got banned for disobedience. and rightly so. --Evilkolbot 21:07, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
  • • If that's the case, then there should be a short standard saying banning is at the admin's discretion for cause and duration and say that standards of action are considered mostly the same as Wikipedia (and then link to wikipedia's standards). Then a user at least knows where to go to see what they can or cannot do. As an aside, I agree that editing others talk is not acceptable but that's not the same as just deleting talk on one's own talk page (which was the case that started this discussion). As another aside, it might be getting time to archive some of the old discussion, since this page is over 100k. --Lordebon 21:24, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
      • move done. --Evilkolbot 21:45, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
• Evilkolbot, I need to ask you; how could RF have been banned for disobedience? Obedience is defined as following rules or orders, but there are no outlined rules! And not only are there no outlined rules right now, but Evilkolbot, you are suggesting that no rules ever be hammered out because they will lead to lawyers and "acres of text debating equivalence." I would call this discussion an acre of text. The only difference being that we are not debating equivalence but debating the lack of defined rules. If your goal is to reduce the amount of text that must be written and read by admins, you are definitely not accomplishing it with this scenario. If Flargen had issued a warning rather than a ban, I doubt that it would have ruffled RF's feathers, so he'd never have told Flargen off, and everyone would be getting on with their happy lives. The admins are treating RF like he is a hardened criminal that either won't or can't change, but until this shitstorm occurred, no one had any problems with him on the wiki. Look at all of the people who are defending him! Mr. Green said on RF's user talk page, "Excessive bans only prolong the conflict, encouraging the accused to continue the debate. Which leads to more bans." I believe that this is precisely the case. This ban should never have happened and is only making matters worse.--DarthDud 22:34, 13 January 2010 (UTC)