Re: Johannes misbehavior in the wiki, and a request for admin rights (was: wiki "abuse")

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra
[off-list ref] wrote:

Felipe writes:

quoted

I don't think it's a single incident:
Dscho blocked Amire80 (infinite, account creation blocked) (Spamming
links to external sites)

Okay. I hope you get the point- we didn't have Johannes being pulled
up like this before, atleast after I joined the community.

That doesn't mean there aren't other cases like this. The affected
users might have decided to give up, instead of contacting the mailing
list (possibly understandable considering the heat Amir received).

quoted

How exactly? How do we as a community ensure that Johannes is not
going to ban people unfairly? I haven't seen any acceptance of bad
behavior, nor have I seen any hint as to what he will do the next time
something like this happens.

The current issue is solved. Johannes apologized, Amir apologized and
I apologized on behalf of the community. Everyone is happy. The first
step towards correcting a problem is recognizing it- we have succeeded
in doing that and resolving it amicably.

Yes, the original problem has been resolved, but it's not clear what
will happen the next time. There have been many constructive
suggestions, and I haven't seen Johannes comment on any of them.

I've just created a page for people to comment:
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/WikiIdeas#Stop_immediate_blocking

Sverre Rabbelier writes:

quoted

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 09:16, Felipe Contreras
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

How having more than one admin is distasteful?

No, the way you are treating this is.

It's okay to have another admin- I don't think anyone opposes the
idea. Just that I think it's a little inappropriate to have a proposal
for it in an email with the current admin blamed in the subject
line. If the need for another administrator is felt, we can start a
new thread with some suitable candidates and decide amicably keeping
Johannes in the loop. The purpose of the administrator should not be
to "attack", but rather work with Johannes, helping him cope with the
work load. I'm sure Johannes would be happy to have someone else
working with him as well :)

I think it's not healthy for the second maintainer to always pat in
the back the first maintainer; constructive criticism is needed.

Even Johannes has accepted that he misbehaved, so I don't think I did
anything wrong on pointing the truth.

Avery Pennarun writes:

quoted

Right now, whether or not Johannes has done the right thing has been
called into question and is resulting in such an angry thread *only*
because it's impossible to verify what has actually been done.  When
people can verify what happened - which in this case just means
looking at the deleted pages - then trust is possible and easy.

:)

I'm not going to go into details as why I think no warning was issued,
just that we need this:
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/WikiIdeas#Allow_users_to_see_deleted_pages

quoted

Most social problems come from the social environment, not individual
people's actions.  In this case, the social environment (wiki
settings) have been configured explicitly to cast doubt on Johannes.
It was an accident waiting to happen, and it finally happened.

quoted

The proposal to add a second admin to the wiki - or at least make
deleted pages visible to one other person - is not about Johannes.
It's about creating a healthy social environment that allows people to
relieve their suspicion before they let it get out of control.

quoted

So far, all the counterarguments have been of the form, "But Johannes
is a good guy, so we don't need to check on him."  That's an invalid
argument, because the real proposal (modulo the stupid subject line of
this thread) is not about Johannes at all.  Checking on him isn't
about preventing him from being an idiot, it's about preventing
everyone else from being an idiot.  Which I think we can all agree at
this point, would have been nice.

Very nicely put- I have to agree. We have to stop blaming Johannes and
start blaming ourselves and work towards a solution together; example:
have one more admin.

Definitely:
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/WikiIdeas#More_admins

-- 
Felipe Contreras