Thread:Extension talk:Widgets/mediawikiwidgets.org down/reply (17)

I'm not interested in marginalizing the jerks - it's equally bad for us to do it to them as it is for them to do it to us. Part of the reason they're jerks is because they're talented and contribute a lot, which they feel gives them license to walk on people, while others bite their lip. Challenging or confronting them might take away whatever pleasure they get out of their participation here, and if that happens, we lose their valuable contributions.

Instead, I think a better strategy is figuring out what makes them tick, where they derive their power from, and then figuring out how to neutralize them without a confrontation.

One strategy they use is to delete documentation housed at mediawiki.org and insist documentation and other resources be held hostage in their own sadistic little menagerie where they are the sole gatekeepers. That's easy to thwart - just tell them it's fine if they want to keep documentation on their own sites, but deleting other people's documentation here at mediawiki.org for that reason is not permitted.

Once that is the policy, then they'll have to think up new creative ways to satisfy their jerk-urge. Hopefully we can identify those patterns and subtly neutralize them quickly without making more waves than necessary. And, you never know, they might decide it's easier to just resolve their personal issues that makes them jerks, instead of wasting their lives trying to find exploits in the WMF social structure.