Personally I think this line of the conversation (people resigning/fired) is taking the situation a bit too far. At the least not having volunteers administer the WMF's wiki is just punishment already. It seems that the WMF is unlikely to change its policy, so the best they can do to heal the hurt caused by their action is to apologise (and perhaps explain their reasons), which they have done. If they had restored the admin rights, that would have healed some part of the hurt but not all of it, and the affected volunteers would still have the option to "punish" the WMF by not caring about their wiki (i.e. the same situation the WMF has chosen for itself). Apart from this tit-for-tat satisfaction and giving enough time to heal and restore the trusts and relationships, I do not think that further debating this decision would lead to any good results. I have the feeling that we will not get more satisfactory answers as the line of questioning going on creates a situation where the WMF can only defend themselves - I am sure they have shared their best arguments that can be published and the harder they are pushed the more likely they are going to scramble to make up further reasons (instead of either changing the decision or admitting that they had no better reasons) a situation that is unlikely to improve the situation in the way the questioners hope.[1] I would recommend for those personally hurt by the WMF's decision to accept the WMF's apology, stay in the movement but if they feel any satisfaction in it, mete out the punishment of not caring about the WMF's wiki, and move on. The people working at the WMF are multidimensional persons, one mistake does not define them and I am sure the existing relationships will be healed through other channels of interaction and working together. For those of us who were not hurt (this time), I think it would be helpful if we moved the discussions towards more constructive areas: for example, helping come up with some guidelines on community-WMF interactions, including suggestions on best timing of news and the appropriate level and venue of consultations before major decisions, and making sure this kind of training is provided to WMF employees. Best regards, Bence [1] It is just an intuition, but I fear that this property of some questions (their pre-coded "response") can be lowering the quality of some of the other community review discussions (FDC, GAC, AffCom) that rely on the Q&A format.

On May 28, 2013, at 12:38 AM, ENWP Pine <deyntestiss(a)hotmail.com> wrote: Culture Officer position. This type of conversation is really not helpful in any way. I don't know what you're expecting here. --- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Pine says no one suggested firing Gayle or Philippe; I think it's clear that whatever semantics are invoked, he did suggest just that. That's beyond inappropriate, in my view, and an example of the toxic environment that will lead to less fruitful communication from the WMF and not more. It's not in Pine's remit as a volunteer to propose that WMF employees be demoted, especially over something as picayune as administrator rights on a wiki with minimal traffic and less importance. It's unfathomable that Pine thinks he should be writing to Gayle in this way, as if he were her superior and she was obligated to justify her continued employment to him personally. In multiple comments in recent posts Pine has implied that he has real-world expertise in this area... at this point, I find that implication unsupported by evidence of communication skills or the ability to appropriately judge context and audience reaction. It's not traditional to so directly call out a commenter on this list for posts that step over the line, particularly when they remain civil despite being wildly inappropriate. But I think we need to understand that the relationship between volunteers (especially those on the mailing lists) and the WMF is a two way street. We can't expect them to engage better with us if we permit, even by silence, this type of haranguing to continue unchallenged.