On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi there,
I'm flagging the major issues that need to be considered.
1) we can not promise anonymity for the people acting as adjudicators. Any
attempt to have anonymous people hearing a case will attract attention from
a group if obsessive people who out anyone who is anonymous. Plus at times
harass them.
2) the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore
incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that approach is often the
best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to "not feed trolls"
is well engrained into the culture and advise given by mature and
experienced people on the Internet.
3) blocks on Wikipedia are not suppose to be punitive but intended to
immediately stop disruptive user behavior. Attempts to use them to change
conduct is generally not successful. Instead people who are blocked often
become entrenched in proving that they are being treated poorly.
3) there is no way to stop people from editing Wikipedia. The wiki
software as used by WMF allows easy access to join, and edit. Attempts to
stop blocked or banned users from editing is part of what causes
administrators to burn out and ignore problems or over react to them.
4) banning people very engaged in the community rarely causes them to go
away.
Sydney
So we can't bar people from using the site, and we don't have effective
moderation tools (or moderators). We also realize that even if we had
either, they would be used on only a teeny tiny sliver of all pages, and
only by those who know about them and how to take advantage of them.
This all suggests that the only "cures" to civility are to radically
restrict how freely users can interact, or change the culture of the
Internet. The first is antithetical to the nature of Wikimedia projects,
and the second is impossible, so...
Perhaps we decide that curing incivility is a bridge too far, and focus
efforts to narrow the gender gap on other more practical opportunities.