On Nov 27, 2007 11:23 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:56:25 -0500, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Now as I see it. A bad block was made. Admins make bad blocks all the time. There was a private list involved but that was incidental. The block was overturned and then there was way too much drama over the matter.
A masterfully succinct and wholly accurate synopsis.
It was more than just a bad block, in the "admins make bad blocks all the time" sense. It was block based on a methodology that was, to quote a proposed arb com finding, "both unsophisticated and fundamentally flawed. The techniques used are unremarkable, well known and widely publicly discussed." The formerly secret (*) mailing list was apparently not directly involved, but it seems to have led in part to the paranoid thinking which spawned the bad block.
And I'd say the mailing list also is worthy of discussion on its own, regardless of the block. The participation of people with access to sensitive information, in a mailing list not controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation and with an apparent topic of investigating people who use the Wikipedia website, seems extremely problematic.
(*) The fact that the person running the list refused to even give out it's name, and that the membership of the list still has not been revealed, leads me to believe calling it "formerly secret" is accurate. The name of the third list doesn't even appear to have yet been made public, at least not in this thread.