David Gerard wrote:
On 04/12/2007, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
Funny how in 2002 I identified mailing lists and cabals as significant potential problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Cunctator/How_to_build_Wikipedia
Yabbut, how do you stop it happening? I don't see a way to. How do you deal with the problems of mailing lists and cabals when you can't stop either from forming?
A suggestion I've been pondering is to expand [[Wikipedia:Mailing lists]] to list _all_ mailing lists where Wikipedia is the topic, annotated and subsectioned to keep the "unofficial" stuff properly segregated of course. The mailing lists don't have to be public or open, IMO merely listing their existence and subject matter would be very useful for keeping paranoia levels down.
And it would change the "it's not secret, it's just private" defense from a semantic quibble into a verifiable fact; if at the beginning of all this we could have pointed to a revision of [[Wikipedia:Mailing lists]] from 2006 (or whenever) where wpinvestigations and cyberstalking got added that'd probably have calmed things down a bit. I know I would probably have been somewhat reassured.