[Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?

phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki at gmail.com
Sun Jun 5 19:01:21 UTC 2011


Hi Andrew! Can you put the proposal on meta without including the
details about the case?
cheers,
Phoebe

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 5:45 AM, Billinghurst <billinghurst at gmail.com> wrote:
> I also believe that there are special cases where there should be a policy decision made
> by the body that has the responsibility for due diligence, with legal authority and a
> legal basis.  To that end I specifically addressed the why (with detail) and a how
> (possible) to Sue in a separate post.  It contained detail that should not be put onto an
> open mailing list.
>
> My proposal in short was that the stewards are involved and the  conduit for such a
> proposal to the Foundation, and that it could go through any of the discussion points that
> you identified.  It does not circumvent stewards, and is not top-down; it is the close
> with a great big THE END.
>
> Stewards are limited in powers due to the ability for local projects to override.  There
> has to be someone make the call on what is ultimately right for WMF. There will always be
> persons who come and try to avoid blocks, and a ruling from WMF basically means 'no more
> wriggle room'.  Where someone is cyberstalking, close to the line on fraud/identity theft,
> there has to be authority in a ruling.
>
> Regards, Andrew
>
>
> On 4 Jun 2011 at 10:42, MZMcBride wrote:
>
>> Billinghurst wrote:
>> > I disagree, this needs to be a decision by the WMF, not by stewards.  Some
>> > sites are 'independent', and this is a matter that needs to have no wriggle
>> > room, and hence be a definitive statement.  It is simply a case that the
>> > worst of the worst need to be managed from the top and at a policy level,
>> > not as operational issues. This is a due diligence matter.
>>
>> I think it's a fairly dangerous precedent to have the Wikimedia Foundation
>> involved in making individual decisions about who can and can't edit. I
>> realize that in the past, certain system administrators or Jimmy have done
>> this, but as far as I'm aware, the Wikimedia Foundation (as an organization)
>> has not and does not get involved in cases like this for a reason.
>>
>> As Phoebe noted, there have been some efforts at Meta-Wiki (more recently
>> than I thought, actually) to address this. I'd like to see the community
>> give it a good-faith try (or two) to solve this without intervention before
>> seeking top-down involvement. That isn't to say that the two bodies need to
>> be completely separate. One procedure for a global ban committee could be to
>> direct the Wikimedia Foundation to declare particular people as completely
>> unwelcome, or something like that. But I haven't seen too much to suggest
>> that the community can't solve this, only that they haven't yet.
>>
>> Regarding independent projects, a local admin is going to do what a local
>> admin is going to do, no matter whether it's stewards or the Wikimedia
>> Foundation telling them otherwise. That can be handled on a case-by-case
>> basis as appropriate.
>>
>> Honestly, there are other seemingly intractable problems that the community
>> has faced and the response from seeking Wikimedia Foundation help hasn't
>> been great. Controversial content comes to mind. A long study that ended in
>> a report that said "well, yeah, lots and lots of penises on Commons!" I
>> don't really want to see a repeat of that dynamic again. If there are
>> technical or legal aspects to this problem that the Wikimedia Foundation can
>> put resources toward, let's figure out what those are and make it happen.
>> But the community really needs to take charge here, if at all possible.
>>
>> MZMcBride
>>
>>
>
>
>
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