On Mon, 10 Dec 2007, Jimmy Wales wrote:
And we are unfortunate in another respect: due to a misunderstanding of what has happened here, we may see a decline in admins having private conversations with friends to "sanity check" things, and we may see a decline in thoughtfully coordinated on-wiki actions. And that's a shame.
On-wiki actions thoughtfully coordinated off-wiki are one of those things which are likely to be helpful against real abusers, yet harmful to innocent people caught in the crossfire.
Having this kind of coordination can end up being Kafkaesque for an innocent person; the admins already decided what to do with you with you having no opportunity to defend yourself. Human nature being what it is, it's *much* harder to argue against a conclusion after a group of people have extensively discussed it and agreed, rather than during the discussion.