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

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:12:40 -0700, Bryan Derksen
<bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:

>> I completely agree.  I think I've even said as much.  The point here
>> is that this would not mean it was IRC that was to blame for the
>> cock-up, it would be the admin's fault.

>I would also want to know who "some people" were, and whether they
>really thought they had the authority to okay this or if the admin was
>just blowing smoke about having their support.

No admin should ever be under any illusion that no group of fellow
admins, with the explicit exception of the arbitration committee
acting as a body corporate in their official capacity, has the
authority to okay anything.

All you ever get is a straw poll of how something might fly.  And if
you ask the wrong people, or the wrong question, or on the wrong
day, then you *will* get the wrong answer.  The only trustworthy
answer is "no", and even that is not always trustworthy.

>If Durova "simply screwed up", fine, her bad. But if there's a group of
>like-minded editors who were colluding on this and she just happens to
>have had the bad luck to take the fall, I don't want the rest to meekly
>and secretively creep back to whatever they were doing behind closed
>doors that resulted in this happening. I want to make sure this attitude
>and this bad process is rooted out.

Ha!  You want to see the "WTF????" messages that went round
afterwards.  I mean, we like Durova and are doing our best to help
her get over this, but really, we have been pretty blunt with her.

>> It's not clear to me what mechanism other than a private discussion
>> could possibly satisfy the purpose of victims discussing harassment.
>> If this had carried on with cc lists instead of a mailing list there
>> would be no effective difference.

>I'm not saying private discussions should be forbidden. That would be
>silly and unenforceable. I do want it made very clear that one can't use
>private discussions as a foundation for actual live public on-Wikipedia
>sanctions. Unless it's something really extreme like an OFFICE action,
>the evidence needs to come out before action can be taken based on it.

Of course.  And let's be absolutely clear here, nobody on any of
those lists has ever been under any illusion about that.  We have
all been around long enough not to be so silly.  Everything has to
be weighed according to whether it will fly in the community.

An example is the mechanism I recently proposed for dealing with
trolling.  I think it might help, so do some others, but we don't
know, so I've punted it on the admin noticeboard to see what others
think.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG