On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 11:38 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
On 03/12/12 12:35 PM, George Herbert wrote:
Without delving into the specifics here, or concluding either way as to the current case lacking actual evidence in front of me, it is a real and quite serious problem if we don't hold senior and longtime editors to account for abuses they may perpetuate on the Wiki.
The hue and cry of "But I contributed XZY!" is true, but irrelevant. If one is abusive on the Wiki, one damages the community in deep and divisive ways. Everyone needs to understand that. If you start disrupting the community, no matter who you are or where you were, it needs to stop.
This would be fine if all the established admins who abuse newbies were held to the same standards.
But as has been said, Wikipedia is not a democracy. That's enough to make secret Stalinist processes valid.
Ray
There is an insidious problem with our privacy and outing policies that force some disciplinary related discussions off-wiki.
Avoiding things like that are why I use my real full name on wiki.
That said - that's the privacy policy nearly everyone has consistently wanted, and I'm far in the corner minority on the wisdom of the privacy policy as a whole there. The private considerations of privacy related abuses are a necessary outgrowth of the policy and community norm on privacy writ large.
There are similar privacy issues in a number of other areas such as the unblock list and OTRS.
It's all nice and good to point out that some of the effects are stalinist (which, to some degree, I agree) but without a total revamp of the privacy approach across the whole project - if not Foundation - that's as far as I know and see the only way to do it. If you have a better balance point proposal or a specific issue with this case, I for one am interested in it, but it really has to work with the totality of the privacy / management situation...