[WikiEN-l] Who's moderated?

[Stan Shebs]

K P wrote:
> On 9/3/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
>   
>> Marc Riddell wrote:
>>     
>>> Yes! If this List, much less the Project, is to maintain any credibility,
>>> and the confidence of its Community, it has got to remain open, fair and
>>> honest to all. Secrecy breeds suspicion, which breeds distrust. I have never
>>> blindly followed anyone. And too many people have ended up in my therapy
>>> room for having done just that.
>>>
>>>       
>> So then I don't understand why you haven't published all of *your*
>> personal info here - bio, family history, bank account numbers (so I can
>> crosscheck against my list of Microsoft-funded shills, for instance),
>> credit cards, etc. All that is useful in interpreting your postings, so
>> why keep it all secret and breed distrust in the rest of us? You're
>> digging for information on other people that they haven't agreed to
>> disclose, but then turn around and expect to keep information about
>> yourself secret.
>>
>> Stan
>>
>>
>>     
> Stan, this is a bit unlike you, comparing apples and oranges to make a point.
>   
Well, Marc made a statement about fruit in general, so I wasn't really 
being flippant, not too much anyway. :-) There is a lot of stuff that 
remains secret even in large open online projects, often for very good 
reasons. As a former manager in a company that did some highly 
confidential work on open-source software, I know a lot of secrets, some 
of which would unfairly destroy people's reputations if I blurted them 
all out one day (and given the amount of Japanese business involved, the 
yakuza would likely get to me before the legal system would, ha ha).

In fact, one of the ways that potential volunteers evaluate large online 
projects is by whether the degree of openness is compatible with one's 
personality. For instance, some of the BSD Unix projects have long had a 
reputation for secrecy, at least partly because of paranoia over 
security bugs, and the participants like it that way - newbies aspire to 
a position of sufficient trust to be told about unfixed security holes, 
etc. I work on Firefox these days, and every random accusation of closed 
decisionmaking causes a flurry of navelgazing angst among the senior 
Mozillians. WP is very open, and openness is pretty well ingrained in 
the culture; you're going to have a hard time finding a more open 
project out there.

Stan