[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation's partnership with Kaltuna and loss of freedom

[Ray Saintonge]

Robert Horning wrote:
> Along this line of thought, I have seen somebody banned on en.wikipedia 
> that seemed to have behaved themselves rather well on en.wikibooks.... 
> only to have a zealous steward (I won't name names here, but it has 
> happened) go into en.wikibooks and do a permanent ban on their account 
> due to an arbcom decision on en.wikipedia.  I think this is 
> inappropriate behavior on the part of that particular steward, and I 
> hope this doesn't become a widespread practice.  Certainly trollish 
> behavior on one project should be a "heads up" to scan for similar 
> trollish behavior on other projects, but it shouldn't be the automatic 
> reason to kick them off.
>
> Trollish behavior toward trolls begats trollish behavior.  Also, the 
> environment of one project isn't necessarily the same on another 
> project, so you can't really make a good comparison.
>
> I certainly have seen some project administrators work very well with 
> some borderline trolls and be able to redirect the "trolls" behavior in 
> a postive and productive manner, and other administrators with similar 
> situations be very confrontational and make a major enemy out of that 
> troll.  So I'm suggesting here that some wiki communities are able to 
> cope with problem individuals better than others as well.  Also, 
> sometimes a person may mature over the course of time and may be willing 
> to try with a fresh start at a new place...and I'm willing to give most 
> new contributors the benefit of the doubt unless their actions prove to 
> be damaging.
Absolutely! That's a great summary of the situation.  The kind of 
confrontationalism practised by so many of enwp's creates enemies out of 
some editors who could have become great assets had they only been shown 
a little respect.  Viewing adminship as primarily an exercise in vandal 
fighting breeds a confrontational point of view.  It focuses on editors' 
behaviour more than on the encyclopedic product.

In the smaller projects it's much easier to rally around the cause when 
things go sideways.  A person who comes over from wp with 
confrontational or hard attitudes is soon told that things are done 
differently.  When a troll from another project moves to another and 
easily finds a niche, it puts into doubt the entire process that 
happened on the old project.

Ec