On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:20:34 +0000, Christiano Moreschi
<moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
Except in wasn't used for sole express purpose of
helping people
manage harassment, it seems to have been used a fair chunk to bitch
about people - some of those maybe deserving, others definitely not.
It then spawned a bastard daughter, wpinvestigations-l, which really
was used for all sorts of odd purposes and bizarre conversations.
This one didn't have Jimbo (as far as I can tell), and it only had a
couple arbitrators. Some of the arbitrators appear not have been in
on the cyberstalking loop, either.
No list remains entirely on topic, and people who have been subject
to harassment have a lot of hurt to work through.
You are assuming ill faith to a quite unreasonable degree. So what
if not all the arbitration committee were on the lists? It doesn't
matter. Some are, and so is Jimbo, and when something stupid gets
said we allow the person to work through their pain and frustration
and come out the other side.
Durova did not have support for what she did. She misinterpreted
silence as assent. Had she asked "should I block this editor?" I
think the answer would have been no, since there was nothing to
indicate a problem from Wikipedia behaviour.
Aside from a couple of self-evident sockpuppets, confirmed by
CheckUser, nobody has been blocked as a result of discussions on
said lists, that I can recall. Even if the lists had been used as a
sanity check before blocking, that would be no different to what
goes on on the admin IRC channel every day.
Remember, each administrator is responsible for his or her own
actions. Discussion beforehand can help avoid a mistake, but the
fact of having discussed it does not make it any less an individual
responsibility.
If you commented in IRC that you were about to block X, and one or
two people said "great, X is a pain in the ass", and it went to the
admin boards and your block was found to be invalid, would that be
IRC's fault? I'd say not. If, on the other hand, IRC said "whoa,
no, that's actually user Y doing some cleanup work" then a mistake
would be avoided, and that would be good.
What Durova did is covered by Hanlon's Razor, but assuming malice is
precisely what is going on. At some point the culture on Wikipedia
seems to have been infected by "assume bad faith and extrapolate
from there" - I do not know where this comes from, although I have
my suspicions and nobody here would be surprised to hear what those
suspicions are.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG