[Foundation-l] Stalking Article

[Nathan]

SlimVirgin wrote:

> Dan, I feel we've almost left it too late. We currently have a
> situation where several of those involved in some of the stalking
> sites have been promoted to admins, and many more are regular editors
> who routinely pursue editors they don't like -- via wikistalking,
> RfCs, RfArs, and reports on AN/I -- in order to make their time on
> Wikipedia miserable. Shortly after people were shocked that
> NewYorkBrad was outed and left the project, one of the three people
> who was instrumental in trying to out me in 2006 was promoted to
> bureaucrat on another WMF project, with the support of FloNight of the
> ArbCom. What kind of message does that send?
>

The message it sends is that projects are not administrated as a monolith,
and rules vary from project to project while generally not taking into
account the history of a user on other projects. You've mentioned "other
project" actions several times - perhaps the next stage to approach would be
developing a way to handle these serious conduct issues in a cross-wiki way.
What I think the Foundation has been trying to stay away from is getting
deeply involved in the user administration aspects of operating Wikimedia
projects. There are various good reasons for this, reasons that make
attempting other mechanisms worthwhile before involving the WMF directly.

Nathan