On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:20:34 +0000, Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk wrote:
Except in wasn't used for sole express purpose of helping people manage harassment, it seems to have been used a fair chunk to bitch about people - some of those maybe deserving, others definitely not. It then spawned a bastard daughter, wpinvestigations-l, which really was used for all sorts of odd purposes and bizarre conversations. This one didn't have Jimbo (as far as I can tell), and it only had a couple arbitrators. Some of the arbitrators appear not have been in on the cyberstalking loop, either.
No list remains entirely on topic, and people who have been subject to harassment have a lot of hurt to work through.
You are assuming ill faith to a quite unreasonable degree. So what if not all the arbitration committee were on the lists? It doesn't matter. Some are, and so is Jimbo, and when something stupid gets said we allow the person to work through their pain and frustration and come out the other side.
Durova did not have support for what she did. She misinterpreted silence as assent. Had she asked "should I block this editor?" I think the answer would have been no, since there was nothing to indicate a problem from Wikipedia behaviour.
Aside from a couple of self-evident sockpuppets, confirmed by CheckUser, nobody has been blocked as a result of discussions on said lists, that I can recall. Even if the lists had been used as a sanity check before blocking, that would be no different to what goes on on the admin IRC channel every day.
Remember, each administrator is responsible for his or her own actions. Discussion beforehand can help avoid a mistake, but the fact of having discussed it does not make it any less an individual responsibility.
If you commented in IRC that you were about to block X, and one or two people said "great, X is a pain in the ass", and it went to the admin boards and your block was found to be invalid, would that be IRC's fault? I'd say not. If, on the other hand, IRC said "whoa, no, that's actually user Y doing some cleanup work" then a mistake would be avoided, and that would be good.
What Durova did is covered by Hanlon's Razor, but assuming malice is precisely what is going on. At some point the culture on Wikipedia seems to have been infected by "assume bad faith and extrapolate from there" - I do not know where this comes from, although I have my suspicions and nobody here would be surprised to hear what those suspicions are.
Guy (JzG)