I did attempt a getting a discussion going on defining some moderation and appeal guidelines last year on meta, but it died of death after some unfortunately pointy disruptive interventions. At the moment moderation can happen without warning, without a rationale being given when requested and with no possibility of appeal.
Considering my poor experience on another list of being moderated without a clear explanation or evidence, questions about it after a year on moderation being met with silence (which itself just seem unnecessarily hostile) and having emails unposted for up to 18 days at at time, it would be great to have a best practice defined for all Wikimedia lists as to: * when a moderation rational is expected, such as for well established contributors on request * a reasonable appeal process, such as on a meta page devoted to appeals
The current absence of a system just encourages drama and polarization of viewpoints, confuses readers as emails held for a long time on moderation get posted retrospectively into old discussions, and ignores one of our basic principles on Wikimedia projects that improvement and reform should be encouraged. We have plenty of examples of people being disruptive for a time on projects who later become some of our top contributors, possibly as these are dissatisfied people pushing for change; there is no reason to think that email lists are different.
Fae
On 9 June 2015 at 11:33, Tomasz W. Kozłowski twkozlowski@gmail.com wrote:
So I have been on the moderation list for this mailing list for 10 months now.
In the meantime, I have had perfectly valid e-mails sent to this list rejected without a reason, and my appeal not getting any response whatsoever from the moderators.
If this were a wiki, everyone would be shouting themselves hoarse at having people blocked for such a long time, and seemingly without any means of protesting such decisions.
However, this being a mailing list, with the moderation team having no accountability to anyone, and abusing their status multiple times in the past year, such decisions come without any discussion -- mostly because they are made behind closed doors in the spirit of Wikimedia transparency.
So, here is my good-faith attempt at getting taken off the moderation list after ten months of waiting, and perhaps having a stab at finally establishing at least some basic rules of moderator behaviour so that we do not see long-term good-faith contributors hushed up due to expressing criticisms.
-- Tomasz