joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting William Pietri william@scissor.com:
joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
This really shouldn't be being discussed on an open list. [...]
We are an open project, so personally I lean toward discussing as much of this as possible in public. One of the lessons I draw from the BADSITES fiasco is that public decisions based on secret discussion do not stick nearly as well as our usual fully open approach.
Is your concern more about a good-faith discussion accidentally giving someone grounds for action against a participant? About not tipping our hand in some way? About risking legal action against the Foundation itself?
Yes, yes and yes. In general, once there are serious legal threats in play it almost never makes sense to discuss them in the open. This is simple pragmatism. There are many possible risks and not enough gain.
I think this is good advice for entities that have good places other than "the open" to discuss things. Because power is so distributed on Wikipedia, we don't really have that.
We do have the Wikimedia Foundation, of course. But the more involved they get in content issues, the more they put themselves in the legal firing line. So I would expect them to work vigorously to stay very much a service provider that hosts Wikipedia, avoiding an editor-in-chief role.
But for controversial edits, we individual editors are the ones with primary legal responsibility. So I think we editors have to discuss these thing. And the open nature of our project means we must discuss them in the open.
William