[Foundation-l] "Wikidrama" and autonomy of Wikimedia projects

Mon Aug 11 20:57:36 UTC 2008

Joe's elaboration makes the issue hopelessly convoluted,  but what would
obviously
be useful in this case is an organized way of dealing with inter-wiki
problems.

To SUL specifically, usurping a contributor on a project has to be the
decision of
that project and its policies, so long as they do not outright conflict with
Foundation
policies. The SUL implementation definitely suffered from some confusion and
disorganization in this regard - there was quite a scandal on the English
Wikipedia
when a steward performed a SUL usurpation on behalf of an active fr.wp user
(if I remember the details correctly). The outcome of the discussion on
en.wp
was clear - usurping en.wp contributors required the assent of an en.wp
bureaucrat,
who must abide by en.wp rules.

On the second issue, the privacy policy (as you know) governs the
Foundation's
storage and release of personal information. I don't think there is a global
"outing"
policy, so its up to the local community to proscribe and police that sort
of
undesirable activity. A bunch of en.wp users showing up to vote in a
checkuser
election on another project seems strange and wrong, but again its down to
the suffrage policy of that project to control such events.

Its a tough thing, to see conduct on one project that clearly violates the
norms
you've come to expect through your experience in another community. The
structure
and ethos of the projects has developed, though, such that we can't impose
any
but the most basic norms on those communities - or, at any rate, we haven't.

Further policy centralisation is definitely something to consider, and it
seems to me
to be inevitable over time anyway. Some of the policy changes on meta
recently have
seemed to represent the views of the "wider community" at the expense of ,
or
without regard to, the views of the "local communities." If you want to
further that
movement, then the way to start is to propose new and well focused policies
on meta.

Nathan

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 4:34 PM, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 12:57 PM, Cary Bass <cary at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > Scenario 2:
> > A user has been banned on enwiki.  The user has "outed" psuedonymous
> > individuals via his blog and threads Wikipedia Review by compiling
> > information put together elsewhere on the net.  He has taken to another
> > wiki and under the auspices of the local wiki's policy, has put back
> > links to pages which have links to pages (sometimes several pages deep)
> > which "outs" the individuals.
> >
>
> Just an additional note to what Cary wrote--this Scenario 2 in turn then
> spilled over to a separate third project, where users of the first project
> arrived in wide numbers to "vote" in an election of a Checkuser whose home
> project was the first project mentioned in the scenario. En.wiki users
> arrived on the third project after having in many cases little to no prior
> involvement in that third project, to actively vote on the election of a
> user who was primarily active on the first one and who had allegedly taken
> a
> side in that initial dispute that had nothing at all to do with the third
> project. So that scenario #2 actually impacted three projects, not just
> two...
>
> - Joe
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