User:NE Ent/sandbox
Clueful?
In the above section it is incorrectly asserted that I disagree with the assessment that "it's deliberate gaming for attention from an indef blocked user." In fact, I neither agree nor disagree with that assessment; I actually just don't care. All that really matters is mainspace. All this "stuff" behind the Wikipedia:: prefix is supposed to be about keeping that going smoothly. Editors who chose to focus their time here -- especially folks with sysop bits -- really ought to have some idea of the lay of the land before taking action.
More than being a single collective community, Wikipedia is a collection of overlapping communities. One subcommunity cares more that disruptive editors be prevented from continuing to disrupt; another cares more about mainspace quality issues, specifically copyright. Both bring value to Wikipedia and should be respected. So the question becomes: when an indef blocked editor flags a copyvio, what's the best way to deal with it?
From the motivation of the blocked editor standpoint, the likely possibilities are:
- legitimate concern over copyright violation
- attention seeking behavior.
The best course action is one that doesn't require speculation to what the motivation is; there are actually two good choices. One is to fix the copyright with a neutral message: i.e. "rm copyvio" not "remove copyright violation that indef blocked editor flagged..." The second is to ignore it. The former is win-win in that the content is improved and the flagging editor gets minimal attention. The second doesn't benefit mainspace but provides total denial.
Staring another ANI thread when it was already hashed through five months ago is not the way to "deny" attention; it's more like, as David Bowie sang years ago, "putting out a fire with gas-o-line".
There's a non-archived discussion at blocking policy on this very issue; three months old and not many comments. We're much better at participating when we have a specific individual to attack/defend than an abstract principle. In WIkipedia-as-it-should-be, we'd all comment on the blocking policy talk page and come to a consensus on talk page unblock only yes or talk page unblock only no. In Wikipedia-as-it-is, I honestly and regretfully expect that that discussion will end in the usual "no-consensus" muddle and we'll just keep doing this again and again ...