On 13/09/2007, Armed Blowfish
<diodontida.armata(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
There are dozens of reasons why someone might
not have email enabled - having left Wikipaedia,
being on wikibreak, odd privacy concerns, not
involved in blocking people, having offered alternative
off-wiki communication, not knowing their email was
disabled, etc.
My point is, you can't understand why just from looking
at a list, but everyone has a reason, and that makes all
the difference.
I don't believe anyone ever said these people might not have reasons
for it. It's a trivial note - look, here's a problem, it affects these
people; it was dashed off in five minutes. That's *all it is*.
It's not a list of "these are bad people". It's not revealing
confidential information. It's not an indepth study and analysis of
individuals. It's a note of a known problem*, and - helpfully - a list
of some people known to be affected by it, plus implicitly a reminder
to non-admins that it might be a good idea to check. I don't see any
reason people should be expected to go to great lengths to make sure
that no-one has any possible reason to misinterpret them when all
they're doing is making a quick helpful comment.
I think I need to return to the phrase "otherwise no-one would ever
get any work done", which seems quite appropriate.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
* a presumed problem, based on a known issue in similar circumstances
elsewhere, but that's pretty much the same thing.
Couldn't we just have statistics? 'Out of X admins checked,
Y (Z%) had email disabled. Please check to confirm your
email in enabled, especially if you block people.'