The following should be added to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewards in time for debate before validating which of the named people should acquire these responsibilities. This is being mailed on behalf of those whose contributions have been censored, by exactly the people who would be excluded if such criteria were applied: ------------------------ === Liars === People who can be shown to have lied in any Wikimedia forum ought not to be granted this power and approval, even if the lie is small. For instance, to invent serious accusations like "death threats", as RK, RickK and Daniel Mayer have done, when neutral examination of the evidence shows quite the opposite, and then repeat this lie again and again in an [[echo chamber]] like the [[Wikipedia mailing list]], does serious damage to Wikimedia's credibility. Libel is a serious legal matter. Sanctioning it will create problems for the Foundation. And several times, the lying has in fact crossed this line. Casual lying, such as the convenient claim that "egregious vandalism" originated from IP ranges in Halifax (when in fact it was a troll/political issue), also is a sign that someone can't be trusted to speak for any org. Certainly not one trusted to maintain the [[GFDL corpus]] and remove lies from it. Also such fatuous statements as "no legitimate use" applied to anonymous proxies, when there are whole IP ranges blocked, are lies. Maximus Rex makes statements like this, and they're simply false. History of Wikipedia has shown many cases where revealing IPs or names has been highly detrimental to those editing. There are many legitimate anonymizing uses. Like for instance adding categories like this. === Witchhunters === People who make claims about alleged or collective identity based on spurious criteria (like who has "troll" in their name, or uses an easily copied style of discourse regarding [[en:Groupthink]] and bad [[Wikipedia Governance]], which are obvious for anyone to see, all being somehow "the same person"). This would disqualify Daniel Mayer and The_Anome and Morwen, and most likely Angela and Martin Harper as well. === Privacy violators and/or libellers === A particularly serious matter is privacy violations; Some people voluntarily expose their own names, and thereby suffer some ego bruises (Daniel Mayer and Martin Harper and Robert Kaiser among them), others don't (The_Anome, Angela, Morwen, RickK). The right to conceal your name, as long as you don't use some abusive tactic like using proxy servers to mask actual death threats (not made up ones), ought to be absolute. In any case the assignment of any collective or alleged identity to some group of posts is very problematic with no [[interwiki identity standard]] (such as the one proposed based on jabber.org). Those who assume they have the right to do "outing", assigning names (correct or not) to those who offend them, are doing violence to them. If they have a legal issue with the people they are naming, they should take it to the police and courts, who have the power to track down IP numbers. To do so from behind the shield of a pseudonym is worse, but, revealing one's own name is no excuse for revealing others'. You can do as you like to your own body - that doesn't give you the right to do so to others. Daniel Mayer and possibly Martin Harper ought to be ruled out on this grounds. Larry Sanger and Sunir Shah set some very very bad precedents in this regard, and it's time to lose their legacy. Jimbo Wales may have listened to them too much, and not enough to his lawyers. === Conflicted === Those who habitually edit or protect pages or block IPs in which they themselves are in a dispute: This shows a profound lack of respect for objectivity. IF there's a valid reason to do these things, someone who is not in the edit war ought to see it. Those who may gain commercially from certain choices about the administration of the [[GFDL corpus]] - i.e. [[Bomis]] employees. The [[board]] is already conflicted, no reason to conflict everything else. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time.