[WikiEN-l] Moderation on this mailing list

[David Gerard]

On 22/02/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/22/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:

> > CheckUser queries are logged. The only administrator to look at the
> > CheckUser data of all three users you mention is Jpgordon, the very
> > administrator whose CheckUser actions/results you criticise.
> > So, unless you're in bed with a developer, I think it's safe to assume
> > you're lying.

> When do we get to the point that we don't allow this shit anymore on
> wikien? Putting up with all of this makes it way more tiresome than it
> should be to be to read the list.


Put it this way: more than me has thought he's more than one of the
recent posters with a remarkably low evidence:invective ratio.

The poster in question is no longer completely useless to the list. I
think we're slowly training him to write things that are relevant
talking points concerning the project.

I fear that's all we can really do. The fundamental problem is that,
as long as email addresses are free, it's impossible to keep someone
entirely off the list without getting really drastic and screening
just about all messages. And that would in fact make a
conceptually-moderated list, which would be a failure as a list.
wikien-l has to be open, as Wikipedia has to be open.

Heck, I don't want that job as a listmod. I just want to clear the
spam and help people who can't work the Mailman interface and so
forth, and boot out troublemakers only as needed.

As the mailing list for a wiki, readers have to have some of the
tolerance to stupidity they need to have to work on the wiki itself.
Just as working productively with *complete idiots* is pretty much
mandatory on the wiki, putting up with this shit to some degree is
hard to avoid here.


- d.