I did attempt a getting a discussion going on defining some moderation
and appeal guidelines last year on meta, but it died of death after
some unfortunately pointy disruptive interventions. At the moment
moderation can happen without warning, without a rationale being given
when requested and with no possibility of appeal.
Considering my poor experience on another list of being moderated
without a clear explanation or evidence, questions about it after a
year on moderation being met with silence (which itself just seem
unnecessarily hostile) and having emails unposted for up to 18 days at
at time, it would be great to have a best practice defined for all
Wikimedia lists as to:
* when a moderation rational is expected, such as for well established
contributors on request
* a reasonable appeal process, such as on a meta page devoted to appeals
The current absence of a system just encourages drama and polarization
of viewpoints, confuses readers as emails held for a long time on
moderation get posted retrospectively into old discussions, and
ignores one of our basic principles on Wikimedia projects that
improvement and reform should be encouraged. We have plenty of
examples of people being disruptive for a time on projects who later
become some of our top contributors, possibly as these are
dissatisfied people pushing for change; there is no reason to think
that email lists are different.
Fae
On 9 June 2015 at 11:33, Tomasz W. Kozłowski <twkozlowski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So I have been on the moderation list for this mailing
list for 10 months now.
In the meantime, I have had perfectly valid e-mails sent to this list
rejected without a reason, and my appeal not getting any response
whatsoever from the moderators.
If this were a wiki, everyone would be shouting themselves hoarse at
having people blocked for such a long time, and seemingly without any
means of protesting such decisions.
However, this being a mailing list, with the moderation team having no
accountability to anyone, and abusing their status multiple times in
the past year, such decisions come without any discussion -- mostly
because they are made behind closed doors in the spirit of Wikimedia
transparency.
So, here is my good-faith attempt at getting taken off the moderation
list after ten months of waiting, and perhaps having a stab at finally
establishing at least some basic rules of moderator behaviour so that
we do not see long-term good-faith contributors hushed up due to
expressing criticisms.
-- Tomasz
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae