[Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?

[phoebe ayers]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 8:30 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4 June 2011 15:42, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>
>> I think it's a fairly dangerous precedent to have the Wikimedia Foundation
>> involved in making individual decisions about who can and can't edit.
>
>
> They certainly can determine who can and can't use the servers they
> are custodians of.

Frankly, it's not just a question of who has the power to press the
BANNED button; who at the WMF do you think should or has time to sit
around and review the actions of every cross-project problematic user
in every language and decide? We do need to have some sort of clear
mechanism to make and review complaints, and there's simply not those
processes (yet) on a global level. As both a community member and
someone who needs to worry about WMF resources, I want to see a
distributed and scalable process for this sort of thing, one that
involves, serves, and is transparent to the community. If having WMF
office actions to do global (b)locks is helpful or necessary,
especially for these few totally bad actors, fine; but I don't
personally see that as the starting point for a sustainable system. Do
you?

However, as Sue stated earlier in this thread, the WMF is concerned
about this issue, wants to help, and I think further ideas about the
areas in which the WMF could help would be super, especially in
conjunction with community efforts.

-- phoebe