On 3 June 2011 10:38, Scott MacDonald doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sue Gardner Sent: 03 June 2011 18:11 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?
On 3 June 2011 10:00, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I too would like to see the development of a process for global
banning of
users who have created serious problems on either the global or the multiple-project level.
Is there something the Foundation could do to support that happening?
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Sue,
The first thing you could do is simply decree that the user known as poetlister is not welcome on any project controlled by the Foundation. This would be a precedent, but one in fairly unique circumstances (I'm sure Newyorkbrad is a better place to update you on them that I am. But I have no doubt you'll agree the need for a ban.)
Then, if people don't like the precedent of a decree, charge the communities to develop an agreeable mechanism with appropriate checks and balances, to handle any future cases - with the caveat that there must be some provision that can global ban people such as this.
Scott
Responding to Scott, and also MZMcBride earlier... I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation could successfully make decrees to permanently ban editors from all projects. It might be the right solution in some cases, and many editors might welcome it, but it's not our appropriate role and lots of editors would oppose it on principle for that reason. And it doesn't scale. So whether or not it's the right thing to do, it wouldn't work.
Having said that, the current situation seems pretty bad to me. I'm not talking specifically about Poetlister, who I don't know much about, but I've certainly seen a number of situations in which a bad actor is banned from one wiki and reinvents himself on a smaller wiki and continues to cause problems (as well as other variations on that theme). IMO this is a known vulnerability of the small wikis.
But it's complicated, right. Because the small wikis obviously are autonomous. And yet, all the wikis are interdependent, and their choices affect each other.
I am wondering if the Wikimedia Foundation could facilitate or support some kind of multiple-wiki convening (virtual or F2F) to help editors share information and work towards policy on this. And yes, there is also the technical piece of work that MZMcBride mentioned.
Thanks, Sue
On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
Responding to Scott, and also MZMcBride earlier... I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation could successfully make decrees to permanently ban editors from all projects. It might be the right solution in some cases, and many editors might welcome it, but it's not our appropriate role and lots of editors would oppose it on principle for that reason. And it doesn't scale. So whether or not it's the right thing to do, it wouldn't work.
I'm a bit puzzled by this stance. It may be the case that the Foundation does not see its role as removing someone from the community (whether at the level of an individual project or the Wikimedia movement as a whole); but, insofar as the Foundation functions not only as a non-profit organization leading a community movement, but also as a service provider (which happens to provide hosting for the various individual projects), it seems perfectly reasonable for it to prohibit certain individuals from making use of those services, whether or not this correlates to ejection from the "movement" in principle.
In other words, it's proper for the Foundation to determine that someone is not permitted to post material on Foundation-operated sites, independently of any other determination.
Scaling may indeed be a problem; but it's one that only needs to be tackled after we determine that this is a role the Foundation can (and should) play in principle. In practical terms, I doubt that the extremely small number of users engaged in real-world-impacting misconduct (as Poetlister has) would strain the Foundation's resources, particularly given the recent addition of staff members to liaison with the community.
Kirill
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