On 1/22/06, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
Two good reasons such a mailling list should be kept private:
- Admin A posts to the list "User X is being disruptive. What do I do?"
- ADmin B posts to the list "I need a sanity check. User Y has done
this, & I plan on acting thusly. Comments please."
Reasons:
- No one wants to admit in public that they're clueless.
- People are more likely to admit that they'rewrong in private.
- Sometimes a person just needs a vote of confidence to handle a
troublemaker.
I don't see any of this happening if such a list were archived in public.
We see those kind of posts all the time on AN/I
As for the worry that an admin list might be abused to form a cabal to gain control of Wikipedia for its own nefarous ends -- I dunno what those would be, maybe enforce a political litmus test on articles or replace all uses of BC/AD with CE/BCE -- this could be accomplished right now with an offline, private mailing list.
And if this hasn't been attempted yet, then I'm wrong in thinking that there are some people out there smarter than me.
Geoff
Oh it's been tried. However sooner or latter someone finds out about it and informs the community. Once that happens it can be isolated and nutrilised. A bit harder to do with a formaly sanctioned list. The contense of such a list could not be kept secret anyway so it would be a misstake even to try.
-- geni