John Lee wrote:
On 9/6/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 9/5/07 7:29 PM, John Lee at johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
I would also add that speaking in vague abstract generalities is not very helpful or conducive to a resolution of this problem;
These were private communications; that's all you're going to get from me.
Then how can we progress? If I don't even know who to talk to, you're the only way we'll ever find out what's these people's concerns beyond vague ominous descriptions.
There is a shred of a valid issue here, although it's a difficult one to discuss dispassionately, and I believe it's more germane to the wiki itself than this mailing list.
There *is* a class of otherwise-innocent, relatively inexperienced editors who end up, by an unfortunate conjunction of circumstances, being absolutely convinced that they're being unjustly persecuted (often to the point of being blocked and banned) on Wikipedia. Furthermore, there is a class of admins who, through bluntness and tactlessness, end up fostering this paranoia. (It's then exacerbated by the too-accurate-for-comfort perceptions that there are one or more cliques of admins who reflexively defend each other against any serious criticism.)
When I've brought up issues like this in the past, I haven't wanted to do so in the context of a specific example, either, because discussion almost inevitably then turns to a reexamination of the details of the particular example (too often culminating in a self-righteous "See? We were right to block him"), rather than useful reflection on the deeper roots of the problem.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk: Requests_for_comment/StuRat_2&diff=prev&oldid=99684424 for one (rather longwinded, I'm afraid) screed of mine on the subject.
With that said, though, I don't see this as being an issue for the mailing list. This *is* an adequately tolerant list, as I think a skim of its archives will show. Anybody who has become so paranoid and conspiracy-theoretical that they're afraid they'll be moderated on sight for posting to the list is probably beyond our help anyway. (And anybody who *does* manage to be so truculently intractable as to be put on moderation isn't one of the "otherwise-innocent, relatively inexperienced editors" I'm talking about.)