On Nov 27, 2007 11:26 AM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/27/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 27, 2007 11:12 AM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:04:44 -0700, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
A major line is crossed when that "private letting-off of steam" results in administrators blocking users and then refusing to reveal why they did it, though. This wasn't just some private venting session that leaked. If an administrator were to block someone with the explanation "I ran this by some people on an IRC channel and they okayed it, but I can't tell you who or where or why", that would quite rightly result in a furore. "Some people on an IRC channel" don't have any authority to okay anything.
I completely agree. I think I've even said as much. The point here is that this would not mean it was IRC that was to blame for the cock-up, it would be the admin's fault.
I would also want to know who "some people" were, and whether they really thought they had the authority to okay this or if the admin was just blowing smoke about having their support.
If Durova "simply screwed up", fine, her bad. But if there's a group of like-minded editors who were colluding on this and she just happens to have had the bad luck to take the fall, I don't want the rest to meekly and secretively creep back to whatever they were doing behind closed doors that resulted in this happening. I want to make sure this attitude and this bad process is rooted out.
Bryan, I've read through this e-mail thread, and in it I see both Matthew and Guy saying clearly and unequivocally that Durova did not even *propose* blocking !! on the private lists, much less get approval for it. Do you think they are both lying?
One of the things that isn't included in this thread is hte email Durova sent to the list. If you haven't seen it, go read it, and you'll see why we're all so stressed out by this. There isn't a person on the encyclopedia who couldn't be banned by this sort of kangaroo court, if someone had an ax to grind. And if the discussions are secret, they'll never even know they were being suspected-- they'll just wake up banned one day, just like !!.
Wait a minute; what "kangaroo court"? Durova is an individual admin, and Matthew and Guy have both said clearly and unequivocally that she didn't ask *any* list for permission to block, or, I believe, even mention that she was planning to do so.
Durova DID post the "evidence" to the list, and members of that list DID reply back to her "enthusiastically endorsing" the block. (or so she says, and I believe her).
Are you saying that Matthew and Guy are lying? I think you'll have to take a stand here, because Matthew and Guy both said that she didn't even propose a block, so how could someone "endorse" something that wasn't proposed?
Just because she didn't say the magic word "I'm gonna ban them", it was obvious where it was going.
Was it? How could you possibly know? It seems that you have made a bad faith assumption the purpose of the list is to ban WR editors, and are viewing the e-mail through that lens. However, if the purpose of the list is for Wikipedia's victims of cyberstalking to discuss their issues, then I suspect that if people read it at all, most would look at the e-mail and say "huh, well, not particularly relevant to the list, but ok."
Anyone who read hte email and responded with anything other than "Are you crazy, this is NOT sufficient evidence to prove he's a sockpuppet" needs looking at, because I think the community wouldn't trust their judgment anymore than it trusts Durova's.
Regarding a reasonable reaction to the sockpuppeting claim, as Matthew points out "She was completely right, as far as I know, that !! was a returned user grooming an account for adminship. She was wrong in making the unsupported leap beyond that - that this meant it was a banned user grooming an account for adminship - and discounting all other possibilities."