Dear David
I respectfully disagree. My point is that the "community" you refer to is not a representative community at all. for eg. voices from Asia and Africa are not properly represented here.
The community is incapable of policing itself because (to quote a prominent WP criticism site) "the inmates are running the asylum". It needs an external / independent person (Lila ?) to begin the cleaning of the stables, but the task was beyond her.
The credibility of Wikipedia as a brand is going down the tubes rapidly as fresh scandals emerge with alarming frequency. More enemies of the movement are being created daily.
To cite 1 instance, very recently, a prominent organisation, highly critical of WMF in India, managed to get the Zeropaid initiative banned in that country. The organisation is banned on Wikipedia, including for severe off-wiki harassment of our users [1]
" .. WIKIMEDIA pornographers who are masquerading as champions of free speech and free internet to promote their obscenities and lies in India ... TO IMMEDIATELY PROHIBIT ANY FREE INTERNET ACCESS OVER MOBILE DEVICES .. " [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/India_Against_Corrup...
[2] http://trai.gov.in/Comments_Data/Organisation/India_Against_Corruption.pdf
David
On 3/1/16, David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi David,
you say that "A large number of these persons are paid editors / PR -SEO "consultants" who have worked themselves up to positions of administrators".
Although there is no clear evidence, there is a lot of mistrust and suspicion about "paid editing". Since people need to make a living, they find a way to market their skills, sometimes honestly and other times dishonestly. Not everybody can combine a job and take positions of responsibility in the movement without burning out after a while.
However you come to say that the WMF should "purge all rogue editors" and I consider that it is wrong to consider the WMF as the police of the site. It is right to have assistance in legal matters when the community requests it, but it would compromise the autonomy of the movement if the wmf would take an interventionist role. It would do more damage than good >> https://xkcd.com/1217/
I do advocate for an evolution in the culture of the community, but that cannot come from external sources, it has to come from volunteers themselves taking more responsibility, increasing the partnership with the professional arm of the movement, and creating in the process more trust to take appropriate action - and there is never a solid definition of what it constitutes.
When I started the tread I mentioned other volunteership models (like WOOF, or workaway) that could help create more trust. It is unclear if it could work for us, or if it would be scalable, but given the state of the movement perhaps it doesn't hurt so much to try new things and see how it goes.
Cheers, Micru