User:Lysander/Thoughts on being banned from MediaWiki.org

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Revision as of 18:18, 10 May 2015 by Lysander (talk | contribs)
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I'm finding that it's actually even more annoying to be banned from MediaWiki.org than it was to be banned from the English Wikipedia. I wonder why it was even necessary to impose a ban from all WMF platforms whatsoever. No other wiki besides enwiki had seen fit to ban me, so normally that wouldn't be the kind of matter to require a global ban. This is in contrast to, say, Meco, who got kicked off both enwiki and Commons before the WMF stepped in to ban him everywhere.

I guess the theory is that Wikimedia needs to be seen as protecting children by kicking off pedophile sympathizers. This isn't how most other major websites work; for example, Gmail and Facebook won't act on reports that a person is merely a pedophile sympathizer, although they might kick someone off for being a convicted sex offender. A NAMBLA member such as David Thorstad could openly have an account on those sites and interact with 13-year-olds, and the sites' owners would do nothing about it.

I guess I viewed MediaWiki.org in an idealistic way: that it's a place where people of all ideologies can set aside their differences and work together on a project that is totally non-political. Theoretically, there's no reason why Nazis can't work alongside Jews, Christians can't work alongside atheists, gays can't work alongside homophobes, communists can't work alongside capitalists, etc., to document software that can run the wikis for all their organizations, regardless of the ideological conflicts between those organizations. Those disagreements don't get in the way of their cooperating at MediaWiki.org because software is not an ideological topic (aside from issues like the best brace style to use).

The people who get kicked off Wikipedia usually find refuge on other wikis that run MediaWiki. For example, Tyciol went over to Newgon Wiki and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Kicking those users off MediaWiki.org too deprives them of a means of contributing to the development of the software they're still likely to need, wherever they go. Unless, of course, people fork MediaWiki.org. That's basically what I'm doing now, although as Gwern pointed out, it's not very easy.

It's also unclear what are the arguments for the ban from WMF's Git and Gerrit. If the basis is that it's beneficial for the organization's reputation to get rid of bad people, then why am I still allowed on GitHub? Why wouldn't GitHub want to ban bad people for the same reason?