[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Andrew Garrett]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Dror Kamir <dqamir at bezeqint.net> wrote:
> Are there people who would like to help me collect such cases like those
> of Astrology, Kosovo, the Middle East etc. and/or cases that were sent
> to arbitration which didn't help much and the like, and productively
> analyze them in order to think of better ways to treat them and the
> users involve? I am going to talk about the issue on Wikimania 2011 (in
> Haifa), but there is no reason to wait. I believe that this is one of
> the major reason why potential users are reluctant to join and new users
> are driven out.

I don't mean to minimise the importance of keeping our established
users happy and free from harassment, but I want to caution against
the biases that we will undoubtedly have in considering our focus.

Anecdotally, we tend to hear a lot more about established users
picking up and leaving, because these are our friends — we work with
them, chat with them on IRC, and whatever else. But for every story we
hear about an established user leaving because of harassment, there
are ten new-ish users who encounter the same hostile environment and
stop editing without all the pomp and ceremony that necessarily
accompanies the departure of a popular or well-known member of the
community.

So let's make sure we deal with the factors that make our overall
editing environment conducive to hostile conduct. I don't want to see
us fall into the trap of thinking only about long-term established
users who are harassed in the long term, rather than the newer users
who don't get a chance to be harassed in the long term because they
pick up and leave straight away.

-- 
Andrew Garrett
http://werdn.us/