Anthony wrote:
On 9/14/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@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