On 21 May 2017 at 20:12, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 3:34 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm sorry, Pine....but no. It's naming
and shaming. If Praveen had
wanted to highlight the frequency of Wikimedians being granted Wikimania
scholarsips, they could have done exactly what Mike Peel did - compare the
relevant lists and highlight the frequency of users receiving one, two or
three grants over the four years for which data is available. That would
have been - and is - a reasonable point of discussion. It turns out that
Praveen's information was incomplete at best, and incorrect at worst.
It's possible that I misread something, but the question that I read in
Praveen's original email was, "Then, what is the advantage of selecting
same persons again and again for scholarship? Isn't it better to let more
different people to share and experience global community?" I don't see how
citing a specific example amounts to naming and shaming. Unless I'm
overlooking something, there was an honest question of whether current
system of selecting awardees should be modified and examples of the
outcomes of the current award system were provided. I think it is risky to
read negatively into others' motives, and at this point I don't see
evidence that would support a view that there was malicious intent in the
examples being provided. The examples may be uncomfortable, but that's a
very long way from being malicious.
I think you may have missed some comments from the later part of the
thread. I found them highly disturbing. Frankly, they were disturbing
enough that many other Wikimedians I know would have walked away from the
projects entirely; we cannot afford to allow people to be browbeaten for
being able to demonstrate on a repeated basis that they're productive and
valuable members of our community.
That one specific individual has received more than one of them, and
someone is implying that the grantee failed to live up to their undertaken
responsibilities, is not a reasonable way of discussing those points.
I disagree. If there are examples of grantees not fulfilling their
obligations but being awarded subsequent grants, that would be a problem. I
don't want people to be fearful of being attacked for discussing situations
in which they reasonably think that there may be a problem. I think that an
underlying issue may be the lack of transparency in the awards
applications. If there was more transparency then venerability would be
less of a challenge. I realize that this is a complex problem, and
hopefully there can be constructive discussions about how to address it.
It may be a reason to draw this to the attention of the Wikimania
Scholarship Committee, or the WMF Travel and Supports grants staff. It is
not appropriate to start a thread on a mailing list that has thousands of
subscribers. As it turns out, there is good reason to doubt a significant
amount of what was said anyway.
We need to stop enabling behaviour like this. The Wikimania-L mailing list
is not an appropriate place to rail against another Wikimedian. None of
the Wikimedia-related mailing lists are. This is an excellent example of
bullying, and it needs to stop.
Risker/Anne