Last modified: 2011-04-25 23:26:44 UTC
The Countervandalism Network is becoming a more crucial part of the Wikikimedia community (especially for the 100s of so called "smaller wikis"). Right now the back-end is all over the place. The mailinglists were hosted by me on my personal domain. A few weeks ago I switched hosting plans and didn't move those over and it's been down since. I don't really have the time to maintain the backend of this (moderating is okay), and when rethinking it, it doesn't really seem appropiate to be hosted elsewhere. Please create a public mailinglist "cvn-l@lists.wikimedia.org" and a private one "cvnstaff-l@lists.wikimedia.org".
Can you please detail the difference between the two lists? What is the need for a separate (imho, misnamed) list for "staff"?
The first list is for public discussion by the vandal fighters of the countervandalism network (cross-wiki vandalism issues, suggestions for better tools, fixes for the cvnbot, reports regarding the many #cvn-* channel, support etc.) The second list is for talk between staff members [1] that should not be public (announcements regarding control panel access, or discussion that would otherwise take place in #cvn-staff but can't due to timezone differences, or changes in the access configuration for who has access). Why is it misnamed ? [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CVN#Staff [2] http://countervandalism.net/wiki/Staff
As a general rule, the term "staff" is a tricky one. It can be misunderstood, and even potentially create legal issues. It also conveys a measure of 'ownership' that isn't really conducive to a collaborative work environment. By strict definition, en.wiktionary says staff means "(plural: staff) The employees of a business. (e.g. The company employed 10 new staff this month.)" Conveying that there is a business relationship could result in confusion as to whether someone is an employee/agent of the Wikimedia Foundation, and those people aren't shielded from legal liability.
That sounds fair to me. Although the CVN is probably not going to rename everything right away because of this, I think the mailing list issue can be solved by not calling it after the operators user group name, instead call it 'private' which is more descriptive and future-proof as well. Then the CVN can decide who has access or not So, proposed name: cvn-private-l and cvn-l
We don't really create mailing list for WikiProjects and unofficial Wikimedia groups, so I'm not sure if this is something that should be hosted on Wikimedia's mailman installation. What do others think?
Frankly, given the "mission-critical" infrastructure that's provided by the CVN, I wouldn't have a problem with it, providing the naming issue were reconciled. But that's just me. :-) I don't know what the historical stance has been.
(In reply to comment #5) > We don't really create mailing list for WikiProjects and unofficial Wikimedia > groups, so I'm not sure if this is something that should be hosted on > Wikimedia's mailman installation. What do others think? accounts-enwiki-l is pretty much the mailing list for <http://toolserver.org/~acc/>, so it's not really unprecedented. I agree with Philippe about the "staff" naming issue.
List guidelines lately have had us moving away from the -l suffix. But I'd support the creation of cvn@ and cvn-private@, provided mailman supports list names that are that short, and they're appropriately defined in the list description. :) pb PS - thanks to MZ for providing the precedent.
Both mailing lists created ("cvn" and "cvn-private") and passwords sent to Krinkle.
