[WikiEN-l] WR's secret forum and list

[George Herbert]

On Dec 10, 2007 2:00 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2007, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > And we are unfortunate in another respect: due to a misunderstanding of
> > what has happened here, we may see a decline in admins having private
> > conversations with friends to "sanity check" things, and we may see a
> > decline in thoughtfully coordinated on-wiki actions.  And that's a shame.
>
> On-wiki actions thoughtfully coordinated off-wiki are one of those things
> which are likely to be helpful against real abusers, yet harmful to innocent
> people caught in the crossfire.
>
> Having this kind of coordination can end up being Kafkaesque for an innocent
> person; the admins already decided what to do with you with you having
> no opportunity to defend yourself.  Human nature being what it is, it's
> *much* harder to argue against a conclusion after a group of people have
> extensively discussed it and agreed, rather than during the discussion.

The ideal balance is where sufficient context is always put on-wiki to
explain what was done.

An acceptable balance is if admins keep paying attention and
responding to private or public queries about blocks and so forth so
that if it's not self-evident on-wiki, someone can get an acceptably
prompt off-wiki answer quickly.

Often we fail in both of those; most of the time, it's a good block
anyways, but I try to keep in mind that every time we fall down on
that with a mistaken block, we potentially lose a valuable future or
current contributor.

This isn't structurally solvable.  It requires people to slow down and
talk and think a bit more carefully.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com