[Foundation-l] Consensus on Meta for suspecting every volunteer of abuse ?

Teofilo teofilowiki at gmail.com
Wed Sep 30 14:00:26 UTC 2009


Make the following experience:

Go to Gmail and create a new account on Gmail. Does Google tell you
after you have created your new account :  We are ready to have a
conflict relationship with YOU ? We have an Abuse Log ready for YOU ?

Now go to meta.wikimedia.org (1), create a new account there and click
on your "My contributions" link. And see what you see on the top line
of  Special:Contributions : "Abuse Log". My preference on meta is
French, and it reads ("Journal des abus"). In French "Journal" means
both "Log" and "Newspaper". It sort of says "you are already making
headlines in newspapers for abuse".

It means Wikimedia users are considered as suspects from the first
time they set foot into the wiki. It means that the climate there is a
climate where everyone suspects everybody else, where you are guilty
until proven innocent, and where bad faith is assumed (3).

Jimmy Wales and Michael Snow want to attract new volunteers (2) in
these conditions ?

Can anybody show me the page on meta.wikimedia.org, which shows that a
consensus was reached prior to implementing this Special:AbuseLog
software ?

It is almost the same problem on Commons (my user preference there is
English) where the AbuseLog has been pudically renamed "filter log"
(but the wording with Abuse is still used in the URL).

The French Language Wikipédia is still unaffected by this Abuse thing.
I hope the virus of suspicion will not infect her.

(1) http://meta.wikimedia.org
(2) http://volunteer.wikimedia.org
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith



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