On 31 January 2011 17:49, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I do find it ironic that former members of the Arbitration Committee are proposing that Arbcom go around enforcing "civility" on admins (and everyone else?) when they know perfectly well that it's far outside the scope of the committee to do so.
The problem is that the other two-thirds of Wikimedia are having their reputation adversely affected by en:wp's reputation.
e.g. Tim Starling feels there's no point working on technical measures to attract newbies until en:wp's terrible newbie-biting is fixed: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-December/050843.html
e.g. on the internal list, when I pushed WYSIWYG, the *first* reaction (from a board member) was "that's pointless to think about when people are treated so badly on en:wp."
Crossing the streams of project autonomy would be bad, but a good way to leave others feeling they need to is to make excuses to avoid solving the problem in question. So you may want to not do that.
The so-called "civility issue" is only one thing that turns off female participants. Another is the need to master significant amounts of technical information before being able to edit.
As noted above, even the paid employees amongst the techies want the civility problem fixed before they'll work on that. I believe that puts the ball back in your court.
- d.