I guess I don't object much to specific ban reasons not disclosed to the *public* if it at least is publicly said "reasons of privacy prohibit us from commenting specifically," however I would object if specific ban reasons were not disclosed to the *banned individual*. It's simple fairness and common decency to tell somebody why he or she has been banned.
Consider a user like Russavia who has done a great deal of positive editing, contributed great value, to the WMF projects. He shouldn't just be banned without telling *him* specifically why. Personally I feel he was pushed around at English Wikipedia a lot, that one of his maligned and deleted focus projects "Poland Ball" was for years worthy of its own article, and that had to be vindicated by its articles in like a dozen of the non-English Wikipedias before, after years, the English Wikipedia administrative bullies finally backed down (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polandball, now #3 in Google results).
Of course if the WMF indeed tells the individual the particulars, he or she could himself or herself choose to make that public. Maybe that's what the WMF really doesn't want. If it were done that way, there'd be no "you compromised my privacy" complaint basis for the individual.
Trillium Corsage
20.01.2015, 12:11, "Chris McKenna" cmckenna@sucs.org:
As has been explained multiple times in multiple places, the WMF have been advised, for very good legal reasons, not to give details.
"Believe it or not, there's a sensible reason behind our refusal to comment: we can execute global bans for a wide variety of things (see the Terms of Use for some examples - and no, "provoking Jimbo" is not on the list), some of which - including child protection issues - could be quite dangerous to openly divulge. Let's say we execute five global bans, and tell you the reason behind four of them. Well, the remaining one is pretty clearly for something "really bad", and open knowledge of that could endanger the user, their family, any potential law enforcement case, and could result in a quite real miscarriage of justice and/or someone being placed in real physical danger. So no, we - as with most internet companies - have a very strict policy that we do not comment publicly on the reason for global bans. It's a common sense policy and one that's followed by - and insisted upon - by almost every reasonable, responsible company that executes this type of action. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 04:40, 18 January 2015 (UTC)"
from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WMFOffice#Ban_to_Russavia
Chris
On Tue, 20 Jan 2015, rubin.happy wrote:
Bans without explanations are certainly not acceptible.
rubin
2015-01-20 14:18 GMT+03:00 Ricordisamoa ricordisamoa@openmailbox.org:
It is now clear that the superprotect affair was only a preliminary move. Now they hide themselves behind a collective account < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WMFOffice%3E issuing batches of global locks https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog& type=globalauth&user=WMFOffice&year=2015&month=1 and writing boilerplate replies https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk: WMFOffice&diff=10982297. As with the superprotect, the how is to blame, not the what. Note that I do not object global locks at all. What I object is the lack of a published reason for them, and the community interaction that Lila called so deeply for. They can play with the Terms Of Use, protecting any page on any project and global-locking any account "to protect the integrity and safety of the site and users", actually at their sole discretion. The breach of trust is complete now. The only thing that may stop me from leaving the projects for good is my loyalty to the volunteer community. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Chris McKenna
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