[Foundation-l] Stalking Article

Mon Jun 9 23:24:37 UTC 2008

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 6:12 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> SlimVirgin wrote:
>
>> Dan, I feel we've almost left it too late. We currently have a
>> situation where several of those involved in some of the stalking
>> sites have been promoted to admins, and many more are regular editors
>> who routinely pursue editors they don't like -- via wikistalking,
>> RfCs, RfArs, and reports on AN/I -- in order to make their time on
>> Wikipedia miserable. Shortly after people were shocked that
>> NewYorkBrad was outed and left the project, one of the three people
>> who was instrumental in trying to out me in 2006 was promoted to
>> bureaucrat on another WMF project, with the support of FloNight of the
>> ArbCom. What kind of message does that send?
>>
>
> The message it sends is that projects are not administrated as a monolith,
> and rules vary from project to project while generally not taking into
> account the history of a user on other projects. You've mentioned "other
> project" actions several times - perhaps the next stage to approach would be
> developing a way to handle these serious conduct issues in a cross-wiki way.
> What I think the Foundation has been trying to stay away from is getting
> deeply involved in the user administration aspects of operating Wikimedia
> projects. There are various good reasons for this, reasons that make
> attempting other mechanisms worthwhile before involving the WMF directly.

My point, Nathan, is that someone from the English Arbitration
Committee supported the appointment of that person to bureaucrat. If
they had somehow only slipped through, it would say less about us --
it would only tell us, as you say, that we are not monolithic.

The point is, what can we do? Dan talks about action, but what action
is possible when admins, bureaucrats, stewards, and ArbCom members are
either involved or are not sympathetic?

Sarah