So, for anyone who doesn't know, it's now come out that there was basically a citizens "militia" of sorts that created secret mailing lists where they coordinated their actions and presented secret evidence against those suspected of being affiliated with a BADSITE.
There's an arbitration on-going that is looking into the behavior. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Durova_and_J...
Durova has resigned as an admin. A good user appears to have left the project after being falsely accused of being a sleeper puppet.
This is a LOT of drama. ---
At this time, I can't help but point out that this could have been prevented. The names of the militia haven't yet been made public, but they won't come as a shock to anyone. We've all known about the existence of the rabid Pro-BADSITES crusaders willing to bend or break the rules in order to "defend the encyclopedia". This milita of dedicated troll fighters has been a growing problem here, leading to rampant incivility and massive rifts in the community, and bad feelings all around.
Not long ago, I asked the community (through an RFC) and then Arbcom to intervene to help rein in this behavior. Neither group did so-- Arbiters expressed the belief that it would " cause too much drama".
I understand nobody wants to deal with "drama"-laden cases, and I don't question their motives. Bu with the wisdom of hindsight, I think we've often seen that procrastinating-- putting this problems off and not confronting them immediately-- leads to the problems getting worse and worse, as people become embolden by the community's unwillingness to place checks on unacceptable behavior. I think that in the end, letting these problems continue inevitably causes far more "drama".
I can't help but think that if we had dealt with the incivility and edit-warring issues in a timely fashion, this whole "secret evidence" mess might never have occured, and Wikipedia wouldn't have lost one valuable admin and another promising editor.
Alec