[Foundation-l] Moderate this list

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 1:14 PM, effe iets anders
<effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think we're talking about two groups of people and thinking here:
> 1) a group of people who have the principle "be bold" in their coat of arms
> and love to say anything that comes to mind, no matter whether that might be
> rude or not.
> 2) the people who see discussion more as a social process which is helped by
> involving more people.
>
> At an IRL meeting, one of these two groups sets the atmosphere. Either the
> bold group can discuss loudly and the "social" people feel not at home and
> they leave. Either the social people are nice and are disturbed by the rude
> behaviour of the bold people, and tell them to be nice or shut up.
>
> I tend to prefer the second group, since I sincerely believe that it is
> important and even crucial to allow people to discuss, and allow many people
> to discuss.
>
> By telling that people who don't like the shouting even though they have a
> delete button, by saying that people should just grow a thick skin, you
> clearly say that you belong to the first group, and you are not interested
> enough in their opinion to change your behaviour, even though you don't even
> have a clou how big that group is and who's in it. I would even go as far as
> to say I find that quite asocial and rude, and strikes me in the same way as
> when I go to a cafe, people spit on me and shout at me, and if I complain
> about that, I'm just told that I should go home and not bother, because that
> is just the way they behave in that cafe...

(Answering to Gerard's mail, too.)

It is important to have calm atmosphere during discussions. But, it is
important to have bold/impudent persons in the discussion, because it
is more probable that they'd say to you what do they think and what do
others think, but don't want to say. While they are constructive. And
I may list a number of reasons why do I think that Antony, Thomas
Dalton and even Gregory Kohs *are* constructive (if anyone wants, I'll
make the list).

There are no two groups, there are many different kinds of persons.
Note, for example, that Gregory Kohs calmed down after the escalation,
as well as he is not one of the major contributors to the
foundation-l, which means that he is raising issues when he thinks
that they are important. (BTW, some of his points from two threads are
valid and those facts were new for me.)

Living on Internet and, especially, living inside of one
uber-multicultural virtual community, like Wikimedia is, means that
you have to live with cultural differences; it means that we have to
adapt to each other. And I expect much more adaptation from the side
of highly involved Wikimedians than from the side of those who are
less involved in multiproject, multilingual and multicultural issues.

Another thing is related to the personal contacts. I was thinking to
contact Gregory Kohs personally, but Birgitte (and, probably, others)
already did it. When you have a problem with an insider, it is quite
possible to solve it by talking personally with that person.

If we bureaucratically impose rules which are related to behavior on
lists, our mailing list (or whatever it is) will become more exclusive
and we already have problems related to exclusivity. We need here
persons who are long term contributors to Wikimedia projects, who are
able to write in English (and who are not afraid of writing in
English; because of that fact, for example, we have very small number
of Japanese Wikimedians on this list), who have somewhat bigger
picture about technological and cultural trends and so on.

By imposing strictly rule that, for example, discourse like "See this
[...], I told you that members of WMF Board are liars!", you would
exclude from communication a person who may point from time to time to
some problem. Of course, nicely worded "Calm down!" should be said to
that person, but such person shouldn't be instantly blocked after one
or two emotional overreactions. And it is quite possible that we would
have such situations if we strictly impose rules.

BTW, while communication flows, I don't see that we have a problem
here. Quality of communication may fluctuate, but we are conscious
beings able to regulate it, like we are doing it now.

Another question is related to the participation of people who don't
like climate like foundation-l has. It is related to their perception
of emails on mailing lists. It is not just noise which is exists on
every mailing list, it is, also, about issues which are (ir)relevant
to a person who is reading emails. I know just one Wikimedian for whom
I may guarantee that reads all emails (and not just emails, but RCs of
dozens of wikis, too) and reacts when he thinks that he may give a
relevant contribution. The most of us don't do that; we are using more
or less common algorithms to filter such messages. In that sense, I am
ready to volunteer to teach WMF staff -- and other Wikimedians which
are bothered by the tone and/or noise here -- how to effectively use
mailing lists.

Also, I want to hear criticism toward different issues related to
Wikimedia, including issues related to WMF Board, *here*. I don't want
to be informed about our internal problems at some other place. And,
again, 10% of valid points and 90% of noise seems to me as a
reasonable noise ratio: If someone is able to find one real problem in
ten months, I am ready to use my algorithms for filtering messages
during other nine months. Marking a problem inside of so huge
community is very important job and -- as it is true with other
positions inside of the community and WMF -- everybody makes mistakes.

At last, a comment about list moderation. Whenever I saw that Austin
blocked someone, I wasn't happy with that. Mostly because I didn't see
that inside of a separate thread, because I don't have a clue how many
persons are blocked and why and so on. However, when I realize how
many users this list has and that this list doesn't have any defined
rule, then I may conclude that Austin is doing a great job and that
the problem lays in the lack of *our* organizational efforts. But, we
started to work on that :)