[WikiEN-l] What's going on? - Inquiry 2

[Ray Saintonge]

Anthony wrote:
> On 9/14/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>   
>> Any of us who follow WMF activities will acknowledge
>> that it is only recently climbing out of a period of organizational
>> chaos.  If making such announcements had fallen within Carolyn's normal
>> employment duties there could very well have been confusion about who
>> would make the announcement when she was the person affected.
>>
>> The maxim of not attributing to malice what you can attribute to
>> incompetence can have as much application to organizations as to
>> individuals. I see no reason to suggest more sinister events.
>>     
> Personally, I see lots of things that suggest more sinister events.
> Many of them have been in private conversations, so I can understand
> why you might not have seen them.
>   
I prefer basing my ideas on something stronger than conspiracy theories 
and gossip.
>> Take this theoretical example.  If an employee is found pilfering small
>> amounts from petty cash that person needs to go.  A quiet departure may
>> be best for everyone.  There may not be enough evidence to support theft
>> charges in criminal court, and simply participating may cost much more
>> in employee wasted time than the amount that was stolen.  Considering
>> that some people have already complained that public knowledge of being
>> banned from editing for a short period would irreparably damage their
>> reputations, how much more damaging would internet gnatterings about
>> petty theft be.
>>     
> What "people" have complained about this?  
I used the word "theoretical", though "hypothetical" would likely have 
been better.  I'm sure that I could have suggested other misdemeanors to 
build the picture.
> AB is the only one I can
> think of that's come even close, and I'm not convinced that AB isn't
> just trolling us all anyway.
>   
=-O ?
> Stating that a high level employee of a public charity was fired for
> theft would be quite damaging.  And without rock-solid evidence such a
> statement should probably leave out the "for theft" part.  But
> stealing from a public charity is a quite serious offense.
>   
Theft can come in many forms; I just used a fairly obvious one for 
illustrative purposes.  Whether the theft victim is a public charity 
does not alter the gravity of the offence.

In some companies employees who spend their work time editing an online 
encyclopedia instead of performing assigned duties could probably be 
fired for theft of the employer's time.
> Don't raise strawmen about irreparable damage.  I don't personally
> think that public knowledge of being banned from editing for a short
> period would irreparably damage someone's reputation.  I do think that
> indefinitely displaying the proceedings of a circus court on a site
> with the pagerank of Wikipedia damages reputations, though, and I
> think it's utterly unnecessary.  Issuing a statement saying the XXX
> was fired for undisclosed reasons also damages reputations.  But it's
> much more necessary, it doesn't have to be posted on Wikipedia, it
> could be kept in robots.txt for all I care, anyone caught stealing
> from a public charity deserves it way more than someone who merely
> pisses off a few Wikipedia admins, etc., etc.  Do I really need to go
> on?
Pissing off key people is the sort of thing that is usually discovered 
in the probationary period of a job.  Sometimes people are just 
incompatible.  When that's the case an agreed parting of the ways just 
avoids making each other miserable in the future.  This may not be 
anybody's fault , and there is nothing significant enough in this to be 
made public.

Ec