[Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?

[Kirill Lokshin]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Responding to Scott, and also MZMcBride earlier... I don't think the
> Wikimedia Foundation could successfully make decrees to permanently
> ban editors from all projects. It might be the right solution in some
> cases, and many editors might welcome it, but it's not our appropriate
> role and lots of editors would oppose it on principle for that reason.
> And it doesn't scale. So whether or not it's the right thing to do, it
> wouldn't work.


I'm a bit puzzled by this stance.  It may be the case that the Foundation
does not see its role as removing someone from the community (whether at the
level of an individual project or the Wikimedia movement as a whole); but,
insofar as the Foundation functions not only as a non-profit organization
leading a community movement, but also as a service provider (which happens
to provide hosting for the various individual projects), it seems perfectly
reasonable for it to prohibit certain individuals from making use of those
services, whether or not this correlates to ejection from the "movement" in
principle.

In other words, it's proper for the Foundation to determine that someone is
not permitted to post material on Foundation-operated sites, independently
of any other determination.

Scaling may indeed be a problem; but it's one that only needs to be tackled
after we determine that this is a role the Foundation can (and should) play
in principle.  In practical terms, I doubt that the extremely small number
of users engaged in real-world-impacting misconduct (as Poetlister has)
would strain the Foundation's resources, particularly given the recent
addition of staff members to liaison with the community.

Kirill