On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 9:23 AM, Wil Sinclair <wllm(a)wllm.com> wrote:
To be sure, I'm not used to having anyone from
Lila's team immediately
emailing her through their official company addresses as soon as I ask
a question in a public forum. In this case, the WMF has made it quite
clear that the IRC channels aren't official and/or sponsored by the
WMF, and I was asking about community affairs WRT to those channels.
So my question about why a user was kicked from the channel didn't
have anything to do with the WMF. I still don't understand why this
employee felt it was necessary to bring Lila's attention to "safety
concerns" through official WMF employee channels, although I'm sure he
or she felt it was the right thing to do and I've given them the
benefit of the doubt that it was. Of course, I can't form my own
independent opinion, since a WMF employee revdeleted the rev in
question in the ~10 minutes between when it was first posted and when
I tried clicking on the link.
If you're talking about the message left on Oliver's talk page, it was
a threat by a banned user which included reference to a dream about
him where "knees were nailed to the floor from the back" and other
such lovely details. That's precisely what moderation features on any
site are for, and to the extent that it included implications of
violence, yes, bringing safety concerns to the attention of senior
staff at WMF is appropriate.
Cheers,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation