I'm going to respond to Kerry and Jonathan in two parts of one email. --
Hi Kerry, I did not say that transparency should be a free-for-all, and it's important to keep in mind that transparency from my perspective is intended to ensure due process for everyone involved. That includes ensuring that people who are adjudicating cases are not callously dismissing complaints, mistreating people who have been victimized, neglecting evidence, or rushing to conclusions. I would oppose, for example, people who are adjudicating a case deciding to engage in questioning that is completely unnecessary for dealing with the relevant allegations. On a related issue, I don't trust WMF to adjudicate cases or involve itself directly in deciding who gets to be on Wikimedia sites or attend Wikimedia events; WMF is not the same thing as Wikimedia and I remain deeply unhappy with some of WMF's choices over the years and its lack of apology for those choices. I would be more trusting of a somewhat less transparent process for adjudicating off-wiki problems if it was led by people who are elected from the community, similar to English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee elections. Arbcom is far from perfect, but I have modestly more faith in Arbcom than I do in WMF. On the other hand, arbitrators are volunteers, and over the years I have seen more than one instance of arbitrators appearing to be stressed; volunteers with high skill levels and good intentions are a precious resource, and if one of the outcomes of WMF's strategy process is a move toward having a global Arbitration Committee then one of the difficult questions will be how to get an adequate supply of highly skilled people with good intentions to volunteer. On a related note, I prefer to avoid identity politics when deciding who should be on arbitration committees; I feel that identity politics are often poisonous and make it very difficult to have civil dialogue. How to balance the virtue of diversity with the virtue of avoiding identity politics is an issue that I haven't worked out. We're getting off of the topic of research and into more of a policy discussion, so if you'd like to continue in this topic then I suggest doing so on Wikimedia-l or on Meta. -- Hi Jonathan, I'd be supportive of running small experiments about blocking all IP editors on ENWP and mid-sized Wikipedias to see whether that is a net positive. As you noted, the research would be somewhat complicated when keeping in mind that the researchers would want to check for positive and negative side effects, but I think that it would be worth doing. Would you like to make a proposal in IdeaLab? Regards, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
