James duffy wrote in part:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>Watch out that we don't develop a corps (or
cabal?) of "senior figures"
>that keep tabs on suspected bad guys without others' knowing what's going on.
>We have [[meta:List of Michael's pseudonyms]] available to all;
>any list of DW's pseudonyms should similarly be open to inspection.
>To be sure, such lists should state up front that these are /suspected/.
>(Michael's now does.)
I should have had a smiley after "cabal?" above.
The reason why I suggested this method is to avoid mass
troll hysteria
breaking out as can happen, understandably given the behaviour of some
trolls, everyone was spending their time watching the IPs and all ganging
up on some new user, with each new user from those IPs being presumed
guilty until proven innocent.
OK, I see where you're coming from now.
What I was suggesting that a very small number of
universally respected
wikipedians (eg, Jimbo, Brion and Mav) would have access to a program that
would give them the chance to spot suspicious activities by "new" users
from the range of IPs associated with DW or Michael. [...]
To call that some sort of elitist cabal is misleading.
Certainly; but I said /develop/, not /start with/.
Check out [[Wikipedia talk:Policy on permanent deletion of pages]]
to see how a power once restricted to
a very small number of universally respected Wikipedians
eventually came to be held by a large, but still elite, class: all admins.
Now, this isn't a problem, because the process is open,
and it's clear what the admins do and how to become one.
Your suggestion would be carried out in private, which is the risk.
There's also the matter of avoiding even the /appearance/ of impropriety --
providing that such appearance is reasonable of course
(I don't mean to satisfy every visiting ideologue).
But having mass access to to such a program could cause
more problems than
it would solve and risk creating witchhunts.
Yes, I can understand this.
I guess that I just want the system be clear and above-board.
Even if only Jimbo, Brion, and mav (all of whom /I/ universally respect ^_^)
are the only people with access to the witch-huniting software,
I still think that any hunting that they do should be publicly logged.
Exactly what this entails would depend on the system, of course.
Maybe I don't grasp what you're thinking of in enough detail?
-- Toby