On 2015-01-20 18:21, Sydney Poore wrote:
Frankly, I'm much more concerned about the large number of community indefinite blocks done by a single administrator with no training than these few bans that are investigated and signed off on by a professional whose work is being evaluated.
Sydney Poore
The problem is that WMF already produced a lot of damage, and foremost, damage to their reputation. Russavia at the point he was banned was still a Commons administrator, and he recently survived a desysop discussion. This means he really was trusted by active part of the community (though there was vocal opposition as well). At some point, WMF will need to get volunteer support for some of its actions, and it will be extremely difficult to achieve on Commons. And this is just one of a series of moves they continue to alienate the community with. For me personally, the last straw was not the ban of Russavia, but the accident of I guess last year, when a number of users (not me, I was completely unrelated) were just duly desysopped on WMF internal wiki, because a staffer decided she can manage everything herself (she turned out to be wrong), and no apologies were ever offered, quite the opposite. Community blocks can be (and are sometimes) reversed if needed, but trust and reputation are extremely difficult to recover. I am sorry to write this, but this is how I see the situation.
Cheers Yaroslav