> Wikimedia foundation could audit the admins who defend each other on a tit or tat basis and attack newbies.
The challenge here is that "the community" really doesn't want the Foundation doing that. The interview mentions the last major flare-up along those lines: FramGate, though it amusingly got mis-transcribed as "Forum Gate".
The WMF handed out a 1 year ban from English Wikipedia to an admin called Fram, who this interview describes as "gruff, not friendly, not the most empathetic", for unspecified harassment. There was a great big "community" revolt over it, and the WMF wound up backing down by letting the English Wikipedia arbitration committee undo the ban.
The Foundation has a lot of practical power, in that it runs the servers. On a pure technical level, it can do absolutely anything and nobody can stop it. But it worries a lot about driving away the admin structures that keep Wikipedia working. Wikipedia would melt down very quickly under its own weight if the entire admin infrastructure was legitimately pissed off and stopped contributing.
(I keep putting "community" in quotes because in wiki parlance it gets used to refer specifically to the set of people who involve themselves in Wikipedia governance, rather than the broader community of people who use and edit Wikipedia. There's a lot of power assigned to a fairly small group of people who invest their time in on-wiki politics. It's kinda like local school boards in that way.)
The challenge here is that "the community" really doesn't want the Foundation doing that. The interview mentions the last major flare-up along those lines: FramGate, though it amusingly got mis-transcribed as "Forum Gate".
The WMF handed out a 1 year ban from English Wikipedia to an admin called Fram, who this interview describes as "gruff, not friendly, not the most empathetic", for unspecified harassment. There was a great big "community" revolt over it, and the WMF wound up backing down by letting the English Wikipedia arbitration committee undo the ban.
The Foundation has a lot of practical power, in that it runs the servers. On a pure technical level, it can do absolutely anything and nobody can stop it. But it worries a lot about driving away the admin structures that keep Wikipedia working. Wikipedia would melt down very quickly under its own weight if the entire admin infrastructure was legitimately pissed off and stopped contributing.
(I keep putting "community" in quotes because in wiki parlance it gets used to refer specifically to the set of people who involve themselves in Wikipedia governance, rather than the broader community of people who use and edit Wikipedia. There's a lot of power assigned to a fairly small group of people who invest their time in on-wiki politics. It's kinda like local school boards in that way.)