Friday, March 30, 2007

Protecting people from poisonous personalities

The BBC website has an article about the culture of abuse on line that allows people to be noxious, abusive, threatening to people and in this instance to women. The thing that sparked this off are death threats to a prominent blogger, Ms Kathy Sierra. I read a follow up article on oReillynet called "Open season on women".

We have been extremely lucky and fortunate on OmegaWiki so far with abuse and vandalism. We have also been extremely lucky with our community. I do not exaggerate when I say that we have some great females being extremely relevant to what we do. If both articles need an official reaction, it would be that we will not tolerate such things on OmegaWiki and, that I am still appalled by the way the Wikichix were driven away from the Wikimedia Foundation for all the "right" reasons.

At this stage in the life cycle of OmegaWiki, I can say that people who are deemed to be poisonous in what they do will find that there is little toleration for them. When we get to the stage where it becomes an issue if we should tolerate poisonous people, I can tell you know that I am prepared to fight tooth and nail to get such people out.

Thanks,
GerardM

1 comment:

David Gerard said...

It may be of note that Ubuntu Linux has comprehensively fumbled this one just recently, and the response from the Ubuntu community's "leading lights" shows they consider the Code of Conduct entirely decorative and optional:

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/73035.html