Quarantine Proposal

[Ulrich T. Kragh]

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Occassionally the academic conversation on this list goes awry and members begin to hurl verbal abuses on each other. I find that such postings of mutual defamation and selfdefense are a waste of time. If each member of the list has to spend just thirty seconds on such a message before discarding it, it adds up collectively to almost six hours of lost time for the 700 or so academic members of this list! With so many of such messages, one can only be astounded about how much precious time is thus wasted.

Firstly, I find that it is completely unnecessary to react to any defamation on this list. We are all educated readers and are perfectly capable of judging the arguments of a person ourselves. A nasty tone only discredits the person who utters such words.

Time and again, our moderator urges us to rein in and keep the lid on (and THANKS for that, Dominik), but nevertheless these problems occur over and over. As of now, the moderator can only issue warnings and eventually cancel a person's membership, which is a rather harsh action to take. It is thus difficult (and again time consuming) to do something about the problem.

I will therefore suggest a new tool to be used in these cases by our moderator. Anyone using too harsh or degrading expressions about other members of the list should be given a two-week quarantine to cool off. During this period, the person could still receive postings on the list but must be barred from sending any postings to list him- or herself (possibly technically possible with a "block sender" function, which e.g. exists in many e-mail programs to avoid spamming).

If more than one person engages in such degradation (as someone wisely pointed out: "it takes two hands to clap"), let's give them all some time to cool off. 

I think such an action can be issued more freely (and with less severe consequence) than going to the extreme of cancelling membership (which should, however, still be reserved for repeated and extreme cases).

I realize that this proposal may mean more work for the moderator, but I sincerely hope that he will consider my proposal. If someone has a better idea of how to solve such conflicts on our list, let us hear your (constructive) proposals.

With best regards,
Ulrich T. Kragh
University of Copenhagen