Anthony wrote:
On 9/14/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
Any of us who follow WMF activities will
acknowledge
that it is only recently climbing out of a period of organizational
chaos. If making such announcements had fallen within Carolyn's normal
employment duties there could very well have been confusion about who
would make the announcement when she was the person affected.
The maxim of not attributing to malice what you can attribute to
incompetence can have as much application to organizations as to
individuals. I see no reason to suggest more sinister events.
Personally, I see lots of things that suggest more sinister events.
Many of them have been in private conversations, so I can understand
why you might not have seen them.
I prefer basing my ideas on something stronger than conspiracy theories
and gossip.
Take this
theoretical example. If an employee is found pilfering small
amounts from petty cash that person needs to go. A quiet departure may
be best for everyone. There may not be enough evidence to support theft
charges in criminal court, and simply participating may cost much more
in employee wasted time than the amount that was stolen. Considering
that some people have already complained that public knowledge of being
banned from editing for a short period would irreparably damage their
reputations, how much more damaging would internet gnatterings about
petty theft be.
What "people" have complained about this?
I used the word
"theoretical", though "hypothetical" would likely have
been better. I'm sure that I could have suggested other misdemeanors to
build the picture.
AB is the only one I can
think of that's come even close, and I'm not convinced that AB isn't
just trolling us all anyway.
=-O ?
Stating that a high level employee of a public charity
was fired for
theft would be quite damaging. And without rock-solid evidence such a
statement should probably leave out the "for theft" part. But
stealing from a public charity is a quite serious offense.
Theft can come in many forms; I just used a fairly obvious one for
illustrative purposes. Whether the theft victim is a public charity
does not alter the gravity of the offence.
In some companies employees who spend their work time editing an online
encyclopedia instead of performing assigned duties could probably be
fired for theft of the employer's time.
Don't raise strawmen about irreparable damage. I
don't personally
think that public knowledge of being banned from editing for a short
period would irreparably damage someone's reputation. I do think that
indefinitely displaying the proceedings of a circus court on a site
with the pagerank of Wikipedia damages reputations, though, and I
think it's utterly unnecessary. Issuing a statement saying the XXX
was fired for undisclosed reasons also damages reputations. But it's
much more necessary, it doesn't have to be posted on Wikipedia, it
could be kept in robots.txt for all I care, anyone caught stealing
from a public charity deserves it way more than someone who merely
pisses off a few Wikipedia admins, etc., etc. Do I really need to go
on?
Pissing off key people is the sort of thing that is usually discovered
in the probationary period of a job. Sometimes people are just
incompatible. When that's the case an agreed parting of the ways just
avoids making each other miserable in the future. This may not be
anybody's fault , and there is nothing significant enough in this to be
made public.
Ec