On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 9:23 AM, Wil Sinclair wllm@wllm.com wrote:
To be sure, I'm not used to having anyone from Lila's team immediately emailing her through their official company addresses as soon as I ask a question in a public forum. In this case, the WMF has made it quite clear that the IRC channels aren't official and/or sponsored by the WMF, and I was asking about community affairs WRT to those channels. So my question about why a user was kicked from the channel didn't have anything to do with the WMF. I still don't understand why this employee felt it was necessary to bring Lila's attention to "safety concerns" through official WMF employee channels, although I'm sure he or she felt it was the right thing to do and I've given them the benefit of the doubt that it was. Of course, I can't form my own independent opinion, since a WMF employee revdeleted the rev in question in the ~10 minutes between when it was first posted and when I tried clicking on the link.
If you're talking about the message left on Oliver's talk page, it was a threat by a banned user which included reference to a dream about him where "knees were nailed to the floor from the back" and other such lovely details. That's precisely what moderation features on any site are for, and to the extent that it included implications of violence, yes, bringing safety concerns to the attention of senior staff at WMF is appropriate.
Cheers,
Erik