[WikiEN-l] Missed Opportunities to have avoided the Durova Case

[Alec Conroy]

So, for anyone who doesn't know, it's now come out that there was
basically a citizens "militia" of sorts that created secret mailing
lists where they coordinated their actions and presented secret
evidence against those suspected of being affiliated with a BADSITE.

There's an arbitration on-going that is looking into the behavior.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Durova_and_Jehochman

Durova has resigned as an admin.  A good user appears to have left the
project after being falsely accused of being a sleeper puppet.

This is a LOT of drama.
---

At this time, I can't help but point out that this could have been
prevented.  The names of the militia haven't yet been made public, but
they won't come as a shock to anyone.  We've
all known about the existence of the rabid Pro-BADSITES crusaders
willing to bend or break the rules in order to "defend the
encyclopedia".   This milita of dedicated troll fighters has been a
growing problem here, leading to rampant incivility and massive rifts
in the community, and bad feelings all around.

 Not long ago, I asked the community (through an RFC) and then Arbcom
to intervene to help rein in this behavior.  Neither group did so--
Arbiters expressed the belief that it would " cause too much drama".

I understand nobody wants to deal with "drama"-laden cases, and I
don't question their motives. Bu with the wisdom of hindsight, I think
we've often seen that procrastinating-- putting this problems off and
not confronting them immediately-- leads to the problems getting worse
and worse, as people become embolden by the community's unwillingness
to place checks on  unacceptable behavior.  I think that in the end,
letting these problems continue inevitably causes far more "drama".

I can't help but think that if we had dealt with the incivility and
edit-warring issues in a timely fashion, this whole "secret evidence"
mess might never have occured, and Wikipedia wouldn't have lost one
valuable admin and another promising editor.

Alec