[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Harassing e-mails, part 1

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan at tobias.name>:

> On 20 Nov 2007 at 11:58:16 +0000, "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Does anyone have a problem with kicking off people just here to be
>> crappy to others? This is a working list, after all.
>
> I've got some problem with Kamryn getting kicked off in particular; here,
> she was reacting to
> a mistaken demand from Durova that she apologize, following this sequence
> of events:
>
> 1) Durova mistakenly posts private e-mail to list, with a subject header
> calling it "harassing"
> 2) Kamryn replies, saying that it doesn't seem like harassment
> (fullquoting the original)
> 3) Durova admits that this particular message wasn't harassment, per se,
> but later messages
> in the sequence (not posted to this list) were; and she insists that
> Kamryn needs to make a
> big apology for posting the private message without context and
> criticizing it (although,
> unknown to her at the time, it was actually Durova who posted the message
> to the list out of
> context, and Kamryn was just responding to it; apparently she had intended
> to send it
> privately to somebody else but sent it to the list instead)
> 4) Soon after, Durova realizes her mistake and retracts the call for apology
> 5) Kamryn replies to the reply in #3, getting a little snarky in the process
> 6) You ban her for it.
>
> Now, probably Kamryn should have read the later retraction before
> reacting, and should have
> toned things down a little.  However, there seems to be an atmosphere of
> touchiness lately,
> both on Wikipedia and on this list, where people get easily banned for
> minor incivility
> infractions, if they're on the "wrong side" of the heated "culture wars",
> while people on the
> other side can get away with almost anything.  That doesn't seem fair to me.

I'm in agreement with Dan on this one. Kamryn's behavior didn't seem nearly
ban-worthy compared to some of the lack of civility and personal attacks that
occur on this list on a regular basis. Now, if we're going to start banning
people for them that's one thing. But at minimum some sort of warning 
or agreed
declaration would be in order before that occurred.