There is actually quite a bit of community involvement in the process. They repeatedly respond to community requests for information about processes and are open to community feedback regarding them. What they won't do is give you specific information about specific cases, and so the demands for extreme transparency will never be satisfied. I would support a call for an independent professional audit, from inside or outside the WMF, of cases or processes, but these details should never be revealed to volunteers who do not possess the training to deal with these sensitive issues or have any professional or legal accountability if they screw up or release personal information, as has happened numerous times when community volunteers were entrusted with these tasks.
Personally I have completely lost faith in the clown car of community governance, but I understand that to many in our community it is an important value. But as Nathan said, community governance is not always the best tool. Why do we believe that the same tools can deal with the problems of deciding what to put on the front page and what to do about a victimized child? And to this I would add that these are not issues of community governance at all. The WMF should not interfere in matters of community governance like policy issues regarding article content, etc. But when we are talking about issues regarding off-wiki harassment, sexual predators, etc., why should this fall under the banner of community governance as it has nothing to do with writing an encyclopedia? These are legal, real world issues and should be handled by professionals and/or law enforcement. On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 2:08 PM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am glad to hear that WMF global bans are processed through multiple > people. Still, I am deeply uncomfortable with the lack of community > involvement in this process as well as the lack of transparency. In the US > we don't trust professional law enforcement agencies to make decisions > about who should go to jail without giving the accused the right to a trial > by a jury of their peers. Unless we have lost faith in peer governance > (which would be a radical break with open source philosophy) I think it is > both unwise and inappropriate to have "the professionals" make these > decisions behind closed doors and with zero community involvement in the > process. > > I am in favor of professionals working on investigations, and in > enforcement of community decisions to ban *after* those decisions have been > made by the community through some meaningful due process. I oppose letting > "the professionals" decide among themselves who should be banned. > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
