Correction — I have not been an administrator for three months.

Goodness Gracious! Do You Think You're Pregnant?

Jonny

I've created this blog as a way to disseminate the non-private parts of my personal archive of the emails of Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee. I was a member of this committee from October 2005 through January 2006, and remained privy to its mailing list until September 2006, when I requested to be removed from it. I have some 4300 emails archived during that time interval.

In publishing these emails, of course, I am breaching the expectation that these emails would remain private; I'm sure Jimmy Wales will once again call me a traitor (or some other equally noxious epithet). However, I feel that the general public interest is served by the publication of these emails. An examination of these emails provides significant insight into the internal workings of Wikipedia's parajudicial body, as well as of the personalities of those who provide the closest thing to leadership that the Wikipedia community has. Also, none of these emails is less than two years old, and most of the matters being discussed are long settled; it is unlikely that any of these emails will have much effect on today's Wikipedia. (Or at least they shouldn't. They probably will, because Wikipedia's governance is so personality-centered that I have no doubt that there will actually be some significant effect, but that's really another example of the defects in Wikipedia's governance.) Those interested in understanding the dynamics of one of the Internet's largest social communities will no doubt find much value here.

I will be posting the emails one at a time over, probably, the next several months. I do have to "vet" each email to remove any personal information (other than that of the arbitrators themselves, who, in my opinion, have largely waived their right of privacy by choosing to be arbitrators) from the emails. I intend to limit redactions to the minimum required to protect the privacy of those who are not "movers and shakers" in Wikipedia's community, and all redactions will be obvious. If you, as a reader, notice that I have failed to redact something, please do let me know.

The motivation for this project grows out of a discussion at Wikipedia Review.

I guess we can add Kelly Martin's new blog to the list

http://arbitrary-notions.blogspot.com/

Kelly explains the purpose of the blog here

http://arbitrary-notions.blogspot.com/2009...of-purpose.html

I hereby humbly submit my own blog for inclusion in your esteemed roll:

http://community.livejournal.com/wp_fnord

Even at great risk of giving away my sooper sekret blogger identity.

I made a comment on one of your older posts. You postulated that the WMF Board might one day see a seat bought by an investor. And lo and behold, we have Matt Halprin on the Board now!