Jimmy- (cc to foundation-l)
I wrote:
I'm getting sick of your US bashing. Please stop it now.
I regretted it, and apologized. I apologized again today. I try to be nice to everyone, but sometimes I fail, and I'm very sorry about that.
I see two problems here:
1) People confuse your personal opinions with Wikipedia policy. Maybe a copy&paste disclaimer for your emails would help with that? "The opinions in this email are my own and do not reflect Wikimedia or Wikipedia project policy unless otherwise stated." Most email clients support multiple sigs for purposes like that.
2) People don't realize that Wikimedia is not just Jimbo Wales. Most of our external communications have been very Jimbo-centric so far, but that's partially because there was no elected Board of Trustees, for example. Is there a shared board email address already? Maybe something like board at wikimedia dot org could be used as a replacement for the ubiquitous jwales at bomis dot com. That would also help in combating the Bomis-related conspiracy theories.
A ticket system would offer quite a few advantages over a simple mailing list: 1) no duplicate effort, 2) no need for spamming your inbox, just do everything through a single web interface, 3) easily expand the team of "agents", with different categories and associated user rights. Essentially a Bugzilla for emails.
This system here looks interesting: http://otrs.org/ http://otrs.org/screenshot/
Regards,
Erik