Yeah, that is a tough one.
I don't know my way around, but I would have thought that the right to defend yourself (let alone freedom of speech) should be built into the system. Americans are so eager to cite their Constitution back at you when it comes to defending their actions in the global community, even though it is itself full of contradictions. Contradictions are fine - the world is full of them - just don't moralise to me without seeing your own flaws (I think some other guy put this better than me, a long time ago, when he talked about casting the first stone...) As we regularly note - a pity that these people do not get irony.

Sounds like the case of the little boy who said "the emporer is wearing no clothes" - why is that that the naysayer is shot before there is a decent debate - even then they have a right to have a say. I am currently looking at a project which involves the culture of a country and whether you can criticise your masters and what the consequences might be - the Brits and the Australians get to be far more judgemental that the Americans 8-)

It's kind of hard to judge this based on the information on hand. Typically, I lop all Wikipedia admin into their political cabalhoods that vary from day to day. Maybe Bishzilla was in the wrong cabalhood at the wrong time?

Just another reason why I gave up on Wikipedia as a place to add to the ether.

Sad. I used to hope that in wikipedia we finally had the ultimate democratic knowledge pool. But it seems that someone owns it, after all. While I concede that Wales owns the site, surely the information it contains is owned by the people? I'm really struggling with this one.

I was debating it with my family the other day. It was three against one. They all declared the need for 'someone' to be in charge, while I felt that wikipedia had a large enough community to be self-policing.

Okay I'm an idealist. So sue me. Someone has to be!

I must say I find the message "Banned by Jimbo Wales" quite brutal too.

I wonder if you've thought of contacting Jimbo Wales direct or using Twitter to get a good one-degree-of-separation route into him?

Who will start a page to have Jimbo banned?

I think Wikipedia, while exemplifying many principles which will be common sense in the future, has still one large liability: Its centralized.

In this, the version management system they use looks much like CVS/subversion. Ideally, Wikipedia should be put in a system like GIT: distributed version management. There could be a plurality of slightly different "Wikipedia's", with some only explicitly excluding contributions by some people (e.g. one or more of those centrally "banned" right now, or others who in the end weren't banned) but others possibly excluding whole sections or all contributions from "alternative" world views. Even Conservapedia could "pull" (a term from GIT) directly from the "official" Wikipedia.

This would also remove the problem of the requirement for the NPOV (Neutral point of view). In my opinion, there is no neutral point of view. And even if they were, it seems like people do really good when they are strongly opinionated (e.g. politicians, entrepreneurs). It may be that trying to be "neutral" hurts the "usability" of your knowledge base. It may be that for effectiveness, a simplified world view might be better except for the most extreme cases.

For example (to take a really extreme stand point), its not really necessary to believe in evolution to be a well-functioning member of society. People can do really good while believing in the literal interpretation of Genesis. In practice, this belief in orthogonal to many aspects of life. I wouldn't mind if some people in the world would learn from a "cherry-picked" version of Wikipedia. I don't think those wouldn't make the best biologists or evolutionary psychologists though.

GIT as a software package wouldn't be prepared for the use case I'm describing here. I mainly use it as a reference point.

In practice, we still can expect Jimmy Wales' "repository" to be really important, just like Linus Torvalds still has the last call on the "true" Linux kernel.

For more info on GIT, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)

I would like to add "tolerance of administrator plagiarism" to the list of Jimmy Wales' failings at the helm of Wikipedia:

http://www.mywikibiz.com/Criticism_of_Jimmy_Wales