Shell Kinney - retired? Options

[carbuncle]

That what she said.

[gomi]

No comment, other than to say that we see yet another "encyclopedia editor" who doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's".

[SB_Johnny]

Reproducing on the good chance that this page will be "courtesy deleted":

Drumroll please

Unfortunately the committee got around to announcing my departure faster than I could write something up, which given our track record, is somewhat of a surprise (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

The recent situation has clarified something for me that's been nagging at the back of my brain for quite some time:

I originally joined the projects a number of years ago because I believe very strongly in what they are doing; I also support a number of other open source movements. I've ended up helping in just about every area possible over the years as I discovered when trying to unravel my various points of access. I started to work with ArbCom mostly because people kept telling me they thought I would be good at it and I decided I could volunteer some additional time to in order to help the English Wikipedia run more smoothly.

I remember being very surprised at the things that the committee deals with behind the scenes and even more surprised that this takes up the majority of their time. In my experience, issues of volunteer harassment, pedophiles using organization resources for inappropriate purposes and organizational privacy and security are usually dealt with by someone working for the organization or someone in very close contact with the organization rather than a random body of volunteers making these decisions without guidance. It's always seemed to me that the behind the scenes issues would be better handled by a group dedicated to such things so that the committee could bring its focus back to dispute resolution, but since no one else was doing these things, the committee couldn't just ignore them.

I'm sure the Wikimedia Foundation has unique issues with volunteer coordination and communication due to it's large scope, the novelty of an internet medium and it's need to remove itself from "publishing" the works it helps to create. Nevertheless, I've always felt a bit uncomfortable with the way the Foundation distances itself and the lack of good communication, especially in serious cases such as this recent leak. That someone had to "break ranks" for the committee to get any concrete information on the various issues at play seriously concerns me and we're still almost completely in the dark about what the Foundation is doing and how it plans to handle security going forward - so it's not just the community who's being left out here. Looking back at emails from the past couple of years, the committee has been asking the Foundation for quite some time about getting better, more appropriate and more secure tools. Of course, if the committee was focused on its primary task, it's likely these kinds of things wouldn't be necessary. On top of all this, change is always hard but when dealing with a group of 18 people, getting anyone to agree with or stay focused on change is rather close to impossible.

There's also lot going on in my life at the moment, so it's likely that a long, long break will do a world of good. It's possible that as the project continues to change and evolve, it will turn back into something that makes sense to me so a return is always a possibility. I've turned in all of the access and advanced rights not necessarily as a final break with the projects, but because as recent issues have reminded us yet again, having those things lying around can pose security issues. Shell babelfish 04:15, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

I guess this adds some proof to the theory that the sensible arbs will be the ones to resign. What remains to be seen is whether there will be more of them leaving. Jimbo is most likely frantically emailing and PMing on IRC trying to convince everyone that resigning now would be "feeding the WR trolls". (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)