Do you think Wikipedia vandals should be banned forever?

Nah
I think it’s funny sometimes
There are other sources to get information

Vandals being?

I think PETA extremists should be made to kiss/lick snails and slugs and other creepy crawlies BEFORE they throw red paint on people wearing furs.

As for vandals on Wikipedia, where do we stop after that? People that leave sarcastic and homophobic comments on TouTube? If Wikipedia is your only source for truth, you are a sad little man, my friend.

No. Simply because you can’t ban someone from a website ‘forever’.

Only if it’s not funny.

Yes, they should ban them just like they ban graffiti artists – er, well – um, What’s the next question?

why graffiti artists? They make buildings pretty :(

I think so. Maybe it was funny the first few times but now it’s like some lame joke that’s been going on for way too long.

If they are repeat offenders, I do think they should be banned. They’ve had their chance.

Maybe. Wikipedia contains a lot of politics from what I’ve heard and seen, thus this power to ban will undoubtedly be abused eventually. Beyond that, it’s technically impossible to do so if you are fighting against the most persistent of vandals – you can’t ban their IP address without nuking a ton of innocent people not to mention they will rotate them thus your effort has no result against the vandal.

As far as I’ve seen it, this is not a problem that is dying to be fixed. Vandalized pages get cleaned up very quickly and internal investigations do take place when user accounts start doing bad things. There really is only so much they can do though.

If it were up to me, I would ban them. Destroying other people’s work is not funny.

According to this article, they are trying to do something about it.

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks”

I always found this is the power behind wikipedia. Imagine every response on fluther would have to be approved by the moderation team first. Fluther would lose it’s speed, purpose, community and a lot of moderators in the process. Now imagine the same thing for every wikipedia site for every language.

It’s nice to see that wikipedia is trying to grow up and take responsibility but I hope they don’t lose their ‘neutrality’.

@markyy If that ever happens here, I’m leaving fluther

No. Wikis are setup so that reverting vandalism is trivial. That hormonal kid who gets jollies from inserting naughty text and images into pages may eventually mature into someone with something positive to contribute.

It’s the people who game the wiki system to promote a biased worldview that I would worry about.