On 6/11/08, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
I rather appreciate that suggestion -- it's both an immediate problem and something we can hopefully fix within our current means. The global sysop proposal on meta might be relevant, here. I'll also mention that IRC has proven very useful to me in dealing with cross-wiki problems in real time, before.
I'm not sure a "global sysop" could keep an eye on 784 projects[1] without at least having a "global watchlist". In practice, admin-bots would probably be needed.
Off-site and especially real world harassment and stalking are nothing short of heinous. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for most of us to help, once things go outside the WMF-sphere or offline altogether. That's a key topic: what can we do, as individual users and as a community?
Focus on prevention rather than perpetually ineffective treatment. By more actively discouraging (perhaps outright prohibiting) the use of real-life identity or any information traceable to it. Ask Florence to buy some paper-shredders for the Office. Be creative.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix
—C.W.