On 12/4/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
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?
For one, by ENCOURAGING the people to come forward and blow whistles-- not threatening blocks when they do based on a trumped up copyright claim, ala the Giano think.
For two, you either enforce or abolish WP:CANVASS.
Durova's comment pretty clearly implies that the Secret Mailing List was used in the Miltopia incident, and god knows how many more. One path is to say that such usage is wrong, and for the leadership to actively try to find out who's been involved, and to tell them to stop.
OR, we can take the other path (the one we're currently on and probably will stay on). Off-wiki mailing Lists canvassing is now officially okay. In fact, it has always been okay. If Durova sees something she cares about, we should expect her to immediately tell anyone she thinks will agree with her. The same goes for Giano-- he should feel free to make up his own BCC list, and regularly send out alerts to anything HE thinks people should rally to. And when blocs of people show up at hot-button issues ,we dispense with the pretense that they all got there by coincidence and are independent voices. If six people who always agree show up and agree, we can just go ahead and assume they told each other about it. If you disagree, you should feel free to tell absolutely anyone you feel about it. The Anti-canvassing proliferation treaty has been suspended, and escalation to the best mailing lists is the name of the game.
Obviously, I think the FORMER path would be better than the latter, but I don't know how to return us to that track.
My best guess was to try to get arbcom to officially ask for the mailing list records, have them issue some stern warnings for canvassing, and find out who the other sleuths were and hold them accountable for their off-wiki comments. Had that worked out, that might have given people something to think about before continuing secret lists-- but, that didn't work out. it probably looked too vendetta-esque-- it probably seemed that the inquiries into the mailing lists was motivated just by vindictiveness. I'm just a interloper into project-space, the Arbs live here, and when all the arbs agree, it's clear they know better than I.
So now it seems we're destine for the latter, and the best thing we can do is to let everyone know that the lists exist, and the next time six peopel show up and agree, don't just automatically assume you got six independent opinions-- instead consider the possibility that you got one opinion and five friends.
We've always had to make such considerations when dealing with rednames or low edit count users, of course. But we (or I) used to think admins and arbiters were above suspicious for off-wiki mailing list. Now, regrettably, that can't just be assumed as a given anymore.
Alec