on 12/19/07 3:07 PM, Mike Godwin at mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org wrote: *Be direct - be fair - be assertive - but, above all, BE CIVIL.* Marc Riddell

--- Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: This all sounds nice, however you are truly judging this as reciprocal we have already lost. While those people representing WMF are inherently some of the best people on this list, the "reciprocating" group is open to anyone. There will always be bitter, mean-spirited people around. If lack of transparency is really due to these things, lets increase the moderation to a level where there is enough kindness to warrant transparency. Otherwise everyone will just continue to be held hostage by lowest common denominator. Birgitte SB ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping

Birgitte SB wrote: Open communities have always had their openness and goodwill tested by emotional, clueless, suspicious, and irritable community members, who naturally put other people off (both intentionally and not); as well as by intentional trolls, manipulative people, and sowers if ill will. Wikipedia was built on a foundation of such people (yes, even clueless people -- and they don't remain cluelss for long when you welcome them ;). We are lucky to have problems of primarily the former type on this list -- even our trolls tend to be people who support the community's mission in some fashion; not people who are here because they stumbled across it and want attention. So I am really sad when I see longtime contributors who no longer read the -en list because it offends them so much; or who see this list as a sewer. We have to remedy this; hopefully without raising the barrier to participation. People are hesitant to moderate because noone wants to censor discussion or prevent people from expressing valid perspectives. This is good. Let's increase /mediation/, not what we call list 'moderation' (blocking list contributors). The best community solutions to such situations that I have seen had skilled mediators to step in where there was serious argument. I value the discussions we have on this list very much, and hope that we will find alternatives to giving up on sharing ideas here. Are there any mediators out there willing to take on [part of] a list? (perhaps even some of our current list mods?) SJ

Foundation-l, the mailing list nobody can edit for the encyclopedia everyone can? If we're going to get on the topic of censoring mailing lists, we should deal with Wiki-en-l first, THEN foundation-l. Most of what I see on foundation-l is constructive criticism, and inspired debate with a few snide remarks, not straight trolling attempts. Moderating this list would serve the effect of censoring legitimate criticism by allowing it to be subjected to a "judgment call" by the list moderators before being approved. You want to see a REAL cesspool, spend some time at Wiki-en-l; after that this list smells like roses. -Dan On Dec 21, 2007, at 12:25 PM, Andrew Whitworth wrote:

Hoi Dan, Foundation-l the mailing list about what transcends individual projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. To start with you are apparently at the wrong address. There is a specific list for the English language Wikipedia, there is a list for what brings the Wikipedias together.. Foundation-l is not a refuge for what ails other lists. Now I am not suggesting that you should be moderated, but I do insist that foundation-l is not to be associated with encyclopaedias. That is not what this list is about. By the way there is no need to moderate wiktionary-l .. :) When you equate "legitimate criticism" with Wikipedia, arbitration cabals, all people who "criticise" on this list need to appreciate that they are wrong. Wrong, because this is not what this list is there for. Thanks, GerardM On Dec 21, 2007 6:32 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 21/12/2007, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)gmail.com> wrote: Michael Bimmler and I send each other emails of commiseration quite a bit. We've been applying the Fireaxe of Loving Grace a fair bit on wikien-l, and it's been almost readable of late, with almost 30% non-stupid posts on some days. There's a fair way to go, though, and I'm frequently tempted to just recommend the list be taken out and shot as a net negative. I believe three or four of the listed moderators of wikien-l still bother reading the list ... - d.

SJ Klein wrote: I'm not sure what you mean by mediation. I'm not a member of wikien-l, but foundation-l sure has changed. In 2004 it saw 200-300 messages per month. In 2005-2006 this was 500 messages, a high-volume list but still interesting. Now in October and November 2007, we've seen 1000 messages per month. The technology scales, but people do not. It's certainly possible to filter out a handful of people who comment on everything, but then it's no longer the same list. One could just as well abandon the list. Or we could introduce a limit of 20 messages per person and month. That would force everyone to pick their fights (which is always a good advice, but rarely enforced), instead of allowing the list to degrade into a chat forum. Being able to post 20 messages a month is not censorship. Only the following dozen would have been restricted in November: Posts 97 From: "Thomas Dalton" -- 3 posts per day 60 From: "Brian McNeil" -- 2 posts per day 55 From: "David Gerard" 51 From: Anthony 47 From: GerardM 36 From: Ray Saintonge 34 From: geni 26 From: Florence Devouard 23 From: "Robert Rohde" 23 From: Marc Riddell 21 From: Dan Rosenthal 21 From: "Andrew Gray" These were close: 20 From: Mike Godwin 19 From: "Casey Brown" 17 From: Robert Horning 17 From: "Michael Bimmler" 17 From: "Erik Moeller" 13 From: "Brianna Laugher" 13 From: "Andrew Whitworth" 11 From: Waerth 11 From: Johannes Rohr 11 From: Christiano Moreschi 10 From: Brian 10 From: Aphaia -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

On 12/21/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Hmm. Three posts per day, by which timezone? UTC? Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

Lars Aronsson wrote: People actually seem to be taking this seriously, for reasons that escape me, so perhaps a little nudge in the direction of reality is needed. Limiting the number of messages an individual is permitted to post will only prevent active, honest individuals being insightful or helpful once they have used up their quota. If someone really wants to make themselves heard, they will simply subscribe multiple addresses to the list and continue posting. Only those who play by the rules will lose out. No offense intended, but this is really a very bad idea. I mean, what's next, limiting the number of edits people can make to the wikis? -Gurch

Dmcedvit: There's a difference between putting people on moderation, and moderating the entire list. I support the former, no problem. I wholeheartedly oppose the latter. As for strawmen, I believe the real strawman is automatically equating moderation to "asking for civility": they are not the same thing. If we ask for civility and it is not responded to, we can then moderate individuals. That's only fair. To shoot first and ask questions later is what people criticize about "hardened administrators", whatever that means. -Dan On Dec 21, 2007, at 1:00 PM, Dmcdevit wrote:

On 22/12/2007, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: I strongly agree that something needs to change, but I am not sure what. The requirements to keep up with foundation-l are too high for most Wikimedians to accept. foundation-l is frequently too irrelevant, too esoteric, too flame-filled, to expect people who are motivated to spend most of their wikimedia-time creating content in the projects, to play along. This is a problem when it seems that foundation-l is the main way (??) that the Board gauges "community reaction". This is a bit of a broader issue, but think about the GFDL/CC-BY-SA licensing issue. Discussion about it has more or less died out now but there are still many unresolved issues. It is something that needs to continue to be discussed. There are a few things that could happen. 1) Split foundation-l into several mailing lists for different purposes. copyright-l would be a good start. board2community-l may be another. :) 2) Introduce other mediums of communication, to complement or replace mailing lists, such as message boards (forums) or blogs. Forums have the ability to "pin" important topics at the top which could be useful, and also offer an ability to offer feedback on a posts' relevance *without actually replying to the post*. Mailing lists lack this... 3) Introduce more guidelines about what's appropriate in terms of what community members can "demand" from WMF Board and staff, where the "openness" limits lie. I don't think staff should be subject to arbitrary interrogation from mailing lists, maybe with some exception for the ED. Or if the ED is required to write monthly-or-so reports to the mailing list, that could be a good alternative to any interrogation. cheers Brianna user:pfctdayelise -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

On Dec 21, 2007 4:03 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: It's hard to miss the irony that your 4th post in 24 hours is being used to encourage people to limit postings to 1 or 2 per day. Similarly, I don't think anyone here is really worried that 7 of Anthere's last 9 messages were off-topic or otherwise unjustified. Whether by technical restrictions or "social norms", at best these proposals will cut down on the volume, and do relatively little to improve the signal to noise ratio. Personally, I'm more inclined to agree with Brianna that the problem is one of format more than one of over-participation per se. Foundation-l mixes announcements about board resolutions, changes in staffing, meta level discussions on copyright, the occasional general complaint (e.g. "Racism on Commons" / "Checkuser abuse" threads), and discussions of who is honoring or vilifying us now. As Brianna suggests, a forum or blog may well be a better way to structure some of these topics. Personally, I know if announcements had a blog structure, I'd use RSS to keep track of the new topics and only worry about following the feedback comments for topics that I was directly interested in rather than having to recieve copies of every comment. At some level Foundation-l is a victim of Wikimedia's success. Long-term growth in the brand must inevitably filter into growth in the conversation about Wikimedia. Maybe one can stem that tide for a while by asking for restraint, but sooner or later the only real recourse is to restructure the conversation. Whether that restructuring is best accomplished by new mailing lists or new technologies, is a difficult question to answer, but I'm inclined to believe that mailing lists can't be the answer to everything. -Robert A. Rohde

On Dec 21, 2007 3:31 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: This is actually a nice solution, since people would have to be more thoughtful about what emails they did send. Of course, a better approach may be to limit the number of emails per thread, although people could just start different similarly-named threads to circumvent this. I think what we really want is for people to think more before they send an email, be more composed in those emails, and to be more reserved before spamming a lot of messages to the list. It's hard to enforce a technical solution onto vague problems like these. --Andrew Whitworth

On 12/22/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: I completely agree with this proposal. If traffic is increased it is not bad, but good. So, instead of limiting active participants in amount of emails, better idea is to split lists by their functions. I agree with your proposal from a couple of months ago to split the list firstly to WMF-only and community-only. And about problematic users on the list: We should make explicit rules, vote for them and give to list admins right to impose them in the similar way as admins are imposing blocking on wikis: one day, two days, one week etc.

I think you are confusing a mailing list with a MUD. The former is a communication tool. The latter is a game. -Dan On Dec 22, 2007, at 4:41 PM, Brian wrote:

Today only four emails and mine is fifth? It looks like people are afraid of being on moderation. And this is definitely not good for our communication.

On Dec 23, 2007 5:22 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: You have irritating relatives too? Glad to know i'm not alone :). I agree with this sentiment though, the relative lull now is because of the holidays, not because anybody fears moderation. The vast majority of active list members here aren't in any danger of it anyway. --Andrew Whitworth

Milos Rancic wrote: You may just not be getting the messages; check the archives. I thought I was on moderation myself after one of my own posts failed to materialize after several hours, but after communicating with another subsriber to the list via an unspecified non-mailing-list-based method, it transpired that everyone else and their dog had already read it. -Gurch

Lars Aronsson wrote: Although it's not enforceable as an official limit, I tend to think it's a good idea to limit one's mailing list postings to no more than the number of significant contributions to a Wikimedia project, where a "contribution" is something like writing one good paragraph of a Wikipedia article, uploading an image to Commons, etc. Just posted five messages to foundation-l? Time to find five useful non-meta things to do to make up for it! -Mark

On Dec 24, 2007 7:33 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote: They both have made significant contributions to Wikipedia. Mike even edit wars on his own biography from time to time.