[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Wjhonson]

While I am all about openness and journalism, I had a recent incident which made me re-think something on these lines.
I had a few years back, started creating an open visible search-indexed index to ArbCom proceedings.
Some editors however edit using their real names, not something I would necessarily recommend if you end up at ArbCom and then a search on your name, get's a top Goog because of an index like mine.

People will common names could simply say it's someone else, but people with rare names like Dror Kamir for example, might have some intrepid employer say, "Oh Gee you were involved in that whole   xxxx versus yyyy big controversy in Wikipedia, I don't think your personality would be a good fit here...."

I can see it happening in this connected age, I have done it myself when propositioning a new client, to see what's out there on them.  I decided to make my index invisible temporarily while I mull this over more.

Will Johnson

 

 


 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dror Kamir <dqamir at bezeqint.net>
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Fri, Apr 8, 2011 1:16 pm
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness


Hello,



This resolution is a very positive step. I hope we will soon be updated 

about practical steps to implement it.



Two such practical steps that are easy to implement and would make a 

significant difference, in my opinion:



(1) Administrators' decisions about bans, sanctions etc. should be made 

more public. They are, of course, accessible to anyone as a policy of 

all projects, but they are often "hidden" in many pages with 

non-intuitive titles (for detailed analysis of the problem, see Ayelet 

Oz's presentation in Wikimania 2009 

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:149). Had someone 

followed the administrators' decisions on the biggest projects, and 

publish a monthly newsletter with copies of the most prominent decisions 

about bans and sanctions, it would increase transparency and make 

administrators much more careful about checking cases and providing 

justifications for their actions, especially in what concerns treatment 

of new users. It would also give a better picture about disruptive 

behaviors of users.



(2) Appealing sanctions should be made much easier. I would even go as 

far as opening a special small wiki for such complaints. Reply should be 

provided within a limited period of time, and refer specifically to the 

new user's arguments. This may sound trivial, but projects often fail to 

do so.



Dror K