[Foundation-l] "Wikidrama" and autonomy of Wikimedia projects

[mike.lifeguard]

Unfortunately, you've misunderstood the situation. Since discussing real
situations is normally preferable, here's a hopefully quick, hopefully
neutral description which names names. For your consideration:

Moulton is indefinitely blocked (or maybe banned?) on enwiki, and has since
moved to Meta, then to Wikiversity, where he is working on
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ethical_Management_of_the_English_Language_Wi
kipedia - until recently it contained links to his blog, which apparently
outs Wikimedians. SB Johnny is a CheckUser there, and an admin at Commons
(among other stuff) & was recently nominated for CU at Commons
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators/Requests_and_votes
/SB_Johnny_(checkuser) with the aftermath located at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators/Requests_and_votes/
SB_Johnny_(checkuser)/Bureaucrats_discussion and the talk pages of both).
Due to his involvement with Moulton and his project, several enwiki users
came to Commons to voice opposition. There are some privacy issues involved,
but that much should clarify what we're talking about.

Commons does indeed have an active community - the issue was what to do
about an influx of new users voting on an RFX. Commons doesn't have a
suffrage policy, so there was a small amount of hand-wringing over that
issue, and much drama surrounding the whole affair.

So the situation is not that some outsider had requested CU, and the folks
from elsewhere were largely opposing the nomination. And Johnny is not
banned elsewhere - he is not the problem user.

However, I think your prescription stands. It was appropriate to give light
weight to new users' votes (actually, they were disregarded entirely;
CheckUser uses a straight-up vote :\ ) and with the situation at
Wikiversity, it is up to that community to reign in problem users or not as
they see fit. Certainly past experience of other projects should guide &
inform them though.

Further discussion should not flog the horse described above, but should
please look at the general issues raised.

Thanks, Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Birgitte SB [mailto:birgitte_sb at yahoo.com] 
Sent: August 11, 2008 9:39 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] "Wikidrama" and autonomy of Wikimedia projects

This is a problematic situation, but I don't understand why there is such a
breakdown in communication between the project that it would get to this
point.  I certainly think that it out of line for a non-local community
member to run for checkuser without the local communities blessing if that
is indeed what has happened here.  If there no local community to speak of
it should be a steward issue, and no election of checkuser should be
necessary.  If there is a local community and this report is accurate, I
cannot imagine more insurmountable error that could be made in good faith.
I cannot even imagine how to overcome the cultural gaffe of trying to get
checkuser rights within a local community that is not supportive of the
idea.  Now it could be the local community is supportive of checkuser and
the difficulties in having 22 local voters is leading to crossover support
from other wikis which the local communities is accepting of.  But if the
local
 communities did not invite the situation, I think the non-local editors
need to back off let some people who are untainted by this gaffe try and
salvage the situation and broker some kind of compromise and cooperation.
If this is worse case, it is not the sort of situation which will work out
on it's own to anyone's satisfaction.  But this is all described so vaguely.
Please make it clear about how substantial the local community is and if
they are truly concerned.

Birgitte SB