So you've made a mistake and it's public

It should be noted that you should contact them about their mistake in the most private way possible, then escalating slowly as the need arises. This follows the "praise in public, punish in private" maxim.

I'm not sure apologizing publicly has made anything better for any individual, especially in the current moral panic climate. Mobs don't accept apologies.

Public apologies stamp official guilt on the individual and therefore serve as a license for the mob to further punish them because now they have admitted their fault and therefore are 'officially' guilty of the crime. Public apologies, therefore, are the metaphorical equivalent of blood in the water for attracting sharks.

Maybe it's better to just ignore and maintain innocence because then at least there is some gray area? I don't know.

Jeffrey Toobin: "I was fired today by @NewYorker after 27 years as a Staff Writer. I will always love the magazine, will miss my colleagues, and will look forward to reading their work,"

> Perhaps this has to do with lawsuits.

This happens even in work environments where it's unlikely your coworkers will sue you. I feel like perhaps it's more about competitiveness - I've seen plenty of times people raised in US use any kind of admission of mistake as a bludgeon to get advantage, get more political capital or belittle someone elses project. I guess it's considered to be a good thing to grasp any advantage over others?

It's funny to see this just now. I've started contributing quite a bit to Wikidata as part of some work that uses it as a data source, and it's really the first time in more than a decade that I work in an environment where my work gets public scrutiny.

Shame is a really strong emotion for me, and I feel terrible when anyone spots a mistake. At one point, I left the site and didn't return for three days because I saw there was a notification for me. Which turned out to be positive feedback.

I feel far worse about my own mistakes than about those of others.

What I don't get is people doubling down on obvious mistakes. Show some contrition and your standing will net benefit from you screwing something up. Trust me on this: I'm German and we have made that principle semi-official government philosophy. Whenever I see, say, Turkish nationalists deny the Armenian genocide, or Polish wikipedia deleting articles about local anti-semitic incidents, I wonder if they seriously believe their actions won't make them look both guilty and somewhat stupid.

Oh, while we're at it: Only by participating have I learnt what a vast enterprise the whole of Wikimedia actually is, and how almost all of it is open to the public. It's the only non-profit organisation at FAANG-scale (except Amazon I guess), and you might want to check out, for example, what Graphana looks like at scale: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000605/datacenter-global-...