David Gerard wrote:
On 04/12/2007, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com>
wrote:
The private lists are not the problem per se.
The problem
is that there is behind-the-scenes collusion (in any form),
that it is leading to action, that it is leading to hasty or
mal-thought-action, and most importantly, that this is being
condoned by some part of he community.
I'd call it more "unavoidable" than "condoned" per se. The
community
still pretty clearly holds the person acting responsible for their
actions. If emailing other editors is considered evil, you'll get
people appearing to agree without even adding "I discussed this with
[actor] and ..."
We could make it more clear to people that administrators acting in the
guise of an administrator (as opposed to just doing normal editing that
anyone can do) should make extra careful to both not be doing anything
improper and also not to appear to be doing so. That Wikipedia could be
de-facto co-opted by a cabal of sorts, either internal or external,
isn't an entirely unreasonable fear, since that sort of thing has
happened to many organizations before (entryism long predates the
internet). People are therefore naturally wary of it, so it's worth
making some effort to reassure them that nothing of the sort is going
on. This doesn't require banning all private communications, but there's
some point between discussing things with other admins, and 60 admins
coming out of nowhere to act in concert with no public discussion having
taken place first, that crosses into "certainly looks like a cabal to
me" behavior.
-Mark