Guys, without prejudice to the issue, please don't use terms like desysop or ban in this context. Snowy, you were still an Administrator for the entire (3 hour?) period during which I unilaterally suspended your ability to exercise sysop rights. William, you were still a member in good standing of Wikipedia during the (what was it? 10 minutes?) period during which I blocked you from editing pages. Call it a "suspension" maybe, but nobody ever took it as a "removal from your position" or as an "exile from the community".
Even if I may have been wrong to suspend your power, I had neither the ability nor the intent to change your standing in the Wikipedia community. In both cases, it was just a wake up call, the electronic equivalent of giving your shoulder a little shake. "Hold on, there, fella, do you realize what you're doing?"
(I've expended a lot of effort to preserve, defend, and improve Wikipedia - because I care about the safe settlement of the world's knowledge. A wheel war between sysops would be disastrous for a serious, scholarly project. Adminstrators must not fight with each other. Nothing could make users lose confidence in the integrity of the project faster than that.
(And whatever my shifting opinion is of Dr. Connolley's scientific knowledge, providing him with anything less than a full welcome hurts the project more than any supposed "balancing" of my (correct) ideas and his (incorrect) ideas - even supposing for sake of argument that I'm "right" about GWT. The point is, to use Wikipedia as a neutral expositor of the points of view. I think even Dragon's Flight would agree. And that's why I have amended or clarified my remarks so many times. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of other scientists are watching how we treat Dr. C.) Uncle Ed 11:25, July 13, 2005 (UTC)
- Fair enough. I'll rephrase the section. Snowspinner 13:21, July 13, 2005 (UTC)
- Ditto; it was a 1h block, not a ban: I've corrected myself. But I maintain what I said about psuedoscience... and thats not even part of the Climate Wars! William M. Connolley 16:55:41, 2005-07-13 (UTC).