[Foundation-l] Bunners at the bottom of every page

[Philippe Beaudette]

OK, so - I often find it's helpful to me to write out the situation as we 
know it and pray it sparks a brainstorm in someone else.  If this is helpful 
to you, read on.  If not, please feel free to skip this post and move on. 
And please forgive the long-ish post...:

The facts as we know them are:
-There's one admin on a small project.
-There is no community to form to initiate an RfA of some type for another 
admin
-The extant admin had a bit of a hissy fit when there was a community 
request to de-admin, which resulted in the initiator being banned (what 
further circumstances were there?  Did the initiator honestly DO something 
to get banned?  Or was the ban over just this request to de-admin?)
-The admin has manipulated - in an unacceptable way - the MediaWiki 
interface.
-The admin is - at least in translations we've been supplied (not that I 
doubt them, because I don't - but I don't know if there are explanations 
somewhere or bad translations, etc - I'd feel more secure if I could read 
Russian for myself, but I can't so....) abusive to other members of the 
community and the Foundation.

Given those facts:
-There's no question in my mind that the admin needs to go, but we really 
don't have a mechanism in place to do it, although an RFC on Meta has been 
suggested (which seems sensible to me provided that it can be appropriately 
advertised so that community members - past and present - can comment on 
it).
-How do we handle this in as peaceful a manner as possible, while asserting 
the larger Community's role in the success or failure of this small project? 
That is, how do we handle our moral responsibility to do as little damage as 
possible in dealing with this project while trying to judge from the outside 
what the right steps are?  And, in addition to that, how do we avoid 
sparking a larger conflict with someone who surely feels his world has been 
shattered - just a little bit - but the very large magnifying glass of 
foundation-l, which has just turned itself on "his" project?

There are longer term questions that will have to be dealt with by someone 
other than us:
-How does one reconstitute a community that's had a crisis of confidence?
-How do we locate someone in a fractured community to give the sysop bit to 
when reasonable people may have been run-off from the project?
-How do we keep it from happening again?

Philippe

--------------------------------------------------
From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2008 10:49 AM
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Bunners at the bottom of every page

> On 07/01/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't get the issue here, all that's needed is another admin so that
>> this guy can't just do whatever he likes. Why doesn't the community
>> just have some kind of RFA, let a steward know, and the problem pretty
>> much disappears?
>
>
> Because he's run off anyone who would form membership of such a
> community, as has been noted already.
>
>
> - d.
>
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