On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Sam Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > Yeah, Hanlon's razor perhaps should be remembered here! :-) Not that I mean > to imply any incompetence on the part of the list administrators, but I do > imagine that it's more likely that someone's made a mistake here and is not > being actively mean.
Unfortunately Tony's allegations are spot on. For background, Nathan Carter handed over the list admin to me in January 2013 when he needed to shift his load around. I added Charles Gregory as list admin in October 2013. Without consultation with me, Steven Zhang was added as list admin. I dont know when. Charles, did you add Steven as list admin, or was the WMF involved in that? I've quickly spoken with Steven about Tony being put on the kill list, and received confirmation both him and from Charles. They acted as a majority of list admins, without informing me, but with approval from the Wikimedia Australia committee and after discussion with a Wikimedia Foundation staff member. It seems it happened in January, in response to the emails Tony sent to the list in that month: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaau-l/2014-January/003979.html Steven Zhang was the person responsible for performing the kill list addition. I dont think that Tony's emails warranted this type of response. Putting a respected member of our community on a kill list will neither be particularly successful at silencing criticism, nor is the kill list the appropriate tool - moderation would have been the tool to use if Tony was being disruptive, and direct private discussion between Tony and moderators didn't result in a better path forward. Typically the kill list is used for spammers and people who are banned from Wikimedia projects and are being disruptive on the mailing lists. That does not apply to Tony. It is rude to take these types of moderator actions without informing the person involved, and informing other list admins even after the fact if the action needed to be taken quickly to maintain decorum on the list. Steven and Charles are a bit vague on the details of how this happened, so it is possible that not everyone who was consulted did actually agree to Tony being put on a kill list, and I hope most of them had envisaged that it was going to be implemented with with utmost care for a volunteer that they strive to serve and support. I hope the WMAU committee will give a more detailed explanation of their involvement in this. To everyone who did knowingly agree to Tony being put on a kill list: whether for incompetence, bad communication, or some other excuse - I dont care why - you _should_ be ashamed of yourselves. This is a good time to have someone else, outside of the current committee, step up to be list admin again so that this list does not become effectively controlled by Wikimedia Australia, as we've now seen the organisation will stoop to censorship of this list. -- John Vandenberg _______________________________________________ Wikimediaau-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
