QUOTE(SB_Johnny @ Tue 10th August 2010, 4:41am)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 9th August 2010, 9:08pm)
QUOTE(Abd @ Mon 9th August 2010, 8:57pm)
It is extremely dangerous to allow anyone to be "above the law."
Not if it's an unjust law. If you look at the cases when Thoreau, Gandhi, or King engaged in non-violent civil disobedience, it was to openly flout an unjust law.
Except that they weren't above the law: they were all imprisoned at one time or another.
That's quite right, SBJ. Moulton has missed that these great reformers did not consider themselves above the law. They did serve higher law, which means that they were willing to violate an unjust law, but they also were quite willing to accept the judgment of the law.
You can look further back to Socrates, who amazed everyone by accepting the judgment of the demos that he should drink the poison hemlock. His friends and enemies expected that he'd simply escape, he had sufficient support and I'm sure they didn't make it difficult.
When I review the history of Moulton on Wikiversity, I see that he was willing to flout, not only unjust law, but the collective judgment of the community. That was going too far, in my opinion. He's entitled to his, but by flouting his disrespect of this judgment, he created enemies that need not have been created. Imagine a Gandhi who pissed on his jail guards. Imagine a Martin Luther King who railed against the oppressive honkies.
Kinda hard to imagine, eh? But that's more like what Moulton did.
The issue that came up over and over was the use of real names on Wikiversity. There were complainers, like Ottava, who objected to Moulton "outing" them in emails or on Wikipedia Review. That would not have impressed the Wikiversity community. By denying the right of the community to object to such usage on-wiki, the right to prohibit it when it was unwelcome and in the presence of objections, Moulton was defying the very right of the community to regulate itself, and that is fundamentally disruptive.
I understand his educational purpose, but to move on from the statemate that developed, Moulton would have to be willing to acknowledge and respect the right of the community to self-regulation. Even when the self-regulation is "wrong." When we see a community consensus (or, obviously, a near-consensus -- it isn't full consensus if we disagree!) that we think is wrong, our general social duty is to both respect the consensus, as to regulating our interactions with others, and to protest it, in non-disruptive ways. Protest in disruptive ways may be justified by a consensus that is seriously oppressive, but ... avoiding the use of real names is seriously oppressive! Hello?
It was pure defiance of the community, hence the effective ban and a fair number of people burned by prior efforts at reconciliation. But there are ways to move beyond this, and, my sense, it was happening. Because banning is contrary to the fundamental wiki vision, and should only happen in the extreme, as Moulton backs off from the extreme, if anyone is willing to negotiate a return and is willing to put in the effort to supervise it on behalf of the community, the community should allow this.
Communities, being collections of people, can develop a collective anger that persists in memory. That should be acknowledged and respected, but only to a degree. Our memory of prior trauma can prevent us from moving on when circumstances change.
Briefly, I unblocked Caprice, the acknowledged and managed Moulton sock, opened up to allow identified communication with Moulton in a carefully-controlled "sandbox," so to speak, that user's Talk page. At this point, the Moulton account was also unblocked, so I was not violating "consensus," I was making the two blocks match. (The Moulton account was, and is, under global lock, making it impossible for Moulton to log in, and changing that won't happen until there is a community consensus at Wikiversity to unblock, which is not going to happen until there is some history of nondisruptive Moulton contributions, a chicken and egg problem. Hence the alternative path of a carefully watched experiment, to see if the time is ripe. Moulton is going to edit IP anyway, that can't be stopped, so why not open up an account that is easier to watch -- stable! can use a single contributions list! -- and see what happens?)
This tested the waters. Caprice made, in this trial, one edit. It was not disruptive. The account was blocked. So, at this point, the resistance to healing the rift is coming from within the community. The situation had shifted, though. The Moulton account was reblocked, in an apparent attempt to close off the loophole I'd used. So, now, Moulton is *not* blocked on Wikiversity by Jimbo. It's been done locally, so there are local custodians responsible for it.
On Wikiversity and elsewhere, the excuse has been given, "Jimbo did it." It's time that the wikis take responsibility for what is done in their community. Jimbo is not in charge of these wikis, the communities are, in theory and in fact. Stewards can and will intervene on behalf of critical WMF interests. but they are not collectively stupid, they do not want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, the enthusiastic volunteer community that contributes, by far, most of the value of the WMF wikis. They will not generally defy local consensus unless the WMF interest is truly critical.
The case of Thekohser is much easier to resolve, in my opinion. Thekohser is clearly willing to be cooperative, and the situation at Wikiversity (and probably Wikibooks) is such that unblock is a near certainty if he is patient. It may take removing certain obstacles first, and conditions have been set up that may make this fairly easy. But it takes time. Wikis can be like silly putty. Push hard and fast, and they strongly resist change. Push slowly, respecting the material, and you can make them assume practically any shape, and if the shape is the natural one, if one is pushing toward homeostasis and sustainability, it will stay that way.
I tend to push too quickly, in one way. Tomes, reams of text. It irritates people. Increasingly, I'm putting the tomes in collapse boxes, so that reading them is clearly voluntary.