User blog comment:TimmyQuivy/Introducing SOAP: Our Anti-Vandalism & Spam Team Gets a New Name/@comment-40517619-20200804203902

Cross-posting from the F/G server.

> Funny thing is we actually noindex the History namespace

I thought history is not a namespace, but an action parameter to index.php?

> Spam and vandalism can also be subjective. [and the rest of the paragraph]

I believe this paragraph could be written better to handle an issue with problematic interpretations of "spam" and "vandalism". Specifically, there's the issue that some people assign excessively broad definitions to "spam" and "vandalism". The former may become as broad as "unwanted content", while the latter may become as broad as "any action not conforming with policy". (What's also worrying is that, in some cases, current SOAP member(s) have also used these excessively broad definitions.)

These broad definitions may enable (and create illusory justification for) excessive moderation, including even by SOAP (I might also add the unpopular opinion that the use of such definitions correlates positively with adherence to detrimental moderation practices).

The definition of vandalism as an action against policy – as opposed to its "baseline" definition, an action intended to harm – is especially harmful as it conflates malice and violation of policy, and so makes it harder to argue against policy that interferes with achieving a higher purpose (meaning, collaboration between people interested in a subject for production of a maximally complete and accurate knowledge base on this subject; see also Wikipedia's five pillars, which include the "ignore all rules" principle).