QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Mon 21st September 2009, 3:37pm)
(It was moved yesterday anyway. Warning, 10 megabytes of text, mostly header info. You will not enjoy reading it.)
Fascinating, actually. Some comment about RfAr/Abd-William M. Connelley. No mention of me that I've seen so far. But they seem to have appreciated the result with WMC.
The discussions on the list read like a cooperative group of editors with some generally shared POV and agreement. I saw some stuff that might seem SHOCKING to some, but nothing outside what is routinely done, in fact, by the Cab, and I see, on wiki, far more uncivil description from Cab editors of their opponents. So far, most everything I've seen is quite mild, but I can easily see someone going over it with a fine-tooth comb, looking for whatever might SHOCK arbitrators and others. Like someone suggesting, just IM me if you need a revert.
I fail to see how this is really different from what the Cab does, most likely with watchlists of each other's talk pages, articles of interest, and a bit of contribution-monitoring. A bit more conscious, and the impression I got was not of attempting to warp content. A well-known editor asks for opinions about the reliability of a source. Lots of purely social or technical stuff. Seems like a nice group. May I join?
One thing I Did Not Like. A suggestion from one editor that others be "just a bit provocative" to provoke an perceived enemy into offenses. But there were plenty of advices to be "nice." And none of this should be on Wikipedia, and I'm deliberately avoiding naming any names here. Other than WMC, of course, who wasn't responsible for what they said about him. It was pretty much true, and, in fact, quite moderate, with some praise for him, and, as well, an understanding of the problem.
Whoever compromised that list should be found and sanctioned, if possible. May not be possible.
ArbComm should shut this thing down immediately. These people expected the conversations to be confined to a selected list, and they had a right for that expectation to be realized. I saw nothing on the list that was so totally outrageous that a member would be likely to say, "This has to be revealed." Much more likely, it was a mole. This looks to me like, not a hack job, but simply a private email archive from someone who subscribed and kept the mails. The files are in Outlook format. But, sure, it's possible someone's computer was hacked, which makes it positively illegal, not merely reprehensible.
What people say in conversations with each other, in a protected environment, can be quite different from what they would say in public, and it is not necessarily true that the private conversation reveals their "true nature." There can be shared meanings and understandings that an outsider wouldn't attach. For example, was the suggestion about being just a little provocative a serious one? How serious? Judging a conversation ripped out of its context is quite dangerous.
I see worse here on Wikipedia Review than that list. Much worse. The only thing assertable from the list is some kind of secret coordination, there is clearly a level of that. But crushing such isn't the answer, at all, it's like trying to prevent the tide from coming in. This stuff will happen with present structures, and probably will be a part of improved structures which would harness it and compensate for it. Trying to stop it is like trying to enforce something contrary to human nature. It simply irritates everyone.