On 11 August 2014 01:05, John Lewis wrote:
The people who were actually responsible were the community. Erik was acting in a preventative role to prevent further disruption not punish administrators.
Erik was acting in a manner that is totally disgraceful. He should have never used his force to revert DaB. The way that DaB. "implemented" the results of that RfC were incorrect, and the community of the German Wikipedia were perfectly able to revert his edits themselves once they realized what the effects were — without the need to involve the WMF at any point.
- A new user right to prevent disruption
Implemented without any community consultation whatsoever, on a global scale even though the problem was occurring only on the German Wikipedia.
- A user has been desysoped by the community for no reason on dewiki
Nothing of the sort has happened yet.
And who are we blaming? Erik. Why? Because we are a bunch of stubborn children. We don't get what we want so we are kicking and screaming to get it but in the end; we don't and we then accuse our parent (WMF) of being too harsh, mean and taking away something we like but do not deserve.
The only person that should be blamed by what happened is Erik. He is a WMF employee, he is an experienced Wikimedian, and he should have realized what would be the result of his actions.
Instead, he went ahead with his show of force, and escalated a situation that would have fixed itself in a matter of hours.
Even if MMV was disabled for a day, nothing would have happened. Now shit's happened, and it will be damn hard to regain the trust that was lost over this absurd stretching of muscles.
PS For what it's worth: I like MultimediaViewer. I use it, and I opposed the idea that a small community of volunteers can decide to disable it for anonymous editors. But what Erik has done is totally unacceptable, and contrary to the supposed cooperation between the WMF and the volunteer communities.