[Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Mike Godwin]

I want to write personally -- not speaking on behalf of the Foundation but
instead as a longtime participant in online communities who has worked
extensively on free-speech issues -- to offer my perspective on a couple of
themes that I've seen made in threads here. The first is the claim that
Jimmy's actions represent a collapse in the face of a threat by Fox News
(and that this threat was somehow small or insignificant). The second is the
idea that the proper focus of the current discussion ought to be focused on
Jimmy (and anger against Jimmy's taking action, or against particular
aspects of the actions he took) to the effective exclusion of discussion of
whether Wikimedia Commons policy should be revisited, refined, or better
implemented.

First, my belief as a former journalist is that Fox News is not a
responsible news organization. This means that they get too many stories
wrong in the first place (as when they uncritically echo Larry Sanger's
uninformed and self-interested assertions), and it also means that when
their mistakes are brought to their attention, they may redouble their
aggressive attacks in the hope of somehow vindicating their original story.
This I believe is what Fox News (or at least its reporter and her editors)
were trying to do. If the media culture in the United States were such that
Fox News had no influence outside itself, we could probably just ignore it.
But the reality is that the virulent culture of Fox News does manage to
infect other media coverage in ways that are destructive to good people and
to good projects.

I disagree with the suggestion that it would have been better for Fox to
have gone with the original story they were trying to create rather than
with the story Jimmy in effect created for them.  Jimmy's decision to
intervene changed the narrative they were attempting to create. So even if
you disagree with some or all of the particulars of Jimmy's actions, you may
still be able to see how Jimmy's actions, taken as a whole, created
breathing space for discussion of an issue on Commons that even many of
Jimmy's critics believe is a real issue.

The question then becomes whether we're doing to discuss the issues of
Commons policy or discuss whether Jimmy's actions themselves signify a
problem that needs to be fixed.  You may say we can discuss both, and
technically you'd be right, but the reality of human discourse is that if
you spend your time venting at Jimmy, you won't be discussing Commons
policy, and you'll be diverting attention from Commons policy. My personal
opinion is that this would be the waste of an opportunity.

I think it's also worth remembering that when an individual like Jimmy is
given extraordinary cross-project powers to use in extraordinary
circumstances, this more or less guarantees that any use of those powers
will be controversial. (If they were uncontroversial, nobody would need
them, since consensus processes would fix all problems quickly and
effectively.) But rather than focus on whether your disagreement with the
particulars of what Jimmy did means that Jimmy's powers should be removed,
you should choose instead, I believe, to use this abrupt intervention as an
opportunity to discuss whether Commons policy and its implementation can be
improved in a way that brings it more into line with the Wikimedia projects'
mission. Once this discussion happens, it would not surprise me if the
result turned out to be that some of the material deleted by Jimmy will be
restored by the community -- probably with Jimmy's approval in many cases.

To the extent that Jimmy's intervention has triggered a healthy debate about
policy, I think the powers he used, and the decisions -- not individually
but taken as a whole -- that he made are justified. (Like many of you, I
would probably disagree with some of his particular decisions, but I
recognize that I'd be critical of anyone's particular decisions.) It is not
the case, after all, that Jimmy routinely intervenes in projects these days
-- it is mostly the case that he forbears from intervening, which is as it
should be, and which I think speaks well of his restraint.  It should be
kept in mind, I think, that Jimmy's intervention was aimed at protecting our
projects from external threat and coercion, precisely to give breathing
space to the kind of dialog and consensus processes that we all value and
believe to be core principles of Wikimedia projects. I hope that rather than
venting and raging about what was done in the face of an imminent and
vicious threat gives way to some forward-looking discussion of how things
can be made better. This discussion is best focused on policy, and not on
Jimmy, in my view, since Jimmy's actions represent efforts to protect the
Wikimedia projects and movement. That's where our efforts should be focused
too.



--Mike