On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 5:43 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Anthony wrote:
What established framework are you talking about,
here?
I'm referring to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines (and more
importantly, the underlying principles).
An editor, acting in good faith, might believe that creating pages for
dictionary definitions or dessert recipes improves the encyclopedia.
Does this mean that we're required to refrain from intervening? Of
course not.
Of course not. You should revert the editor's changes.
IAR is one of our most important policies, but it
isn't a license to
dismiss others' concerns. Perhaps a one-off exception to our
vandalism policy *would* improve the encyclopedia, but it isn't
Gwern's place to unilaterally determine this and disregard requests to
seek consensus.
It wasn't vandalism. The vandalism policy is clear about this. It is
not vandalism, but it is prohibited: "What is not vandalism" "Editing
tests by experimenting users: Users sometimes edit pages as an
experiment. Such edits, while prohibited, are treated differently from
vandalism. "
"Obviously I did all my editing as an anon: if
even an anonymous IP
can get away this kind of blatant vandalism just by invoking the name
WP:EL, then that's a lower bound on how much an editor can get away
with."
Thanks for this. I guess he called it vandalism. Unless he's been
lying about his motive, he was wrong, though.
As I said
before, the experiment wouldn't have been at all accurate if
he had consulted beforehand. People would have been on the lookout
for the removal of external links by IP addresses.
[....]
If not, another option was to consult the WMF. (I've noted this several times.)
I doubt that would have worked. And it's not a good use of WMF
employee time anyway. The new TOS is pretty clear that WMF doesn't
want to get involved in such minutiae.
You weren't aware that we generally frown upon
edits intended to
reduce articles' quality?
I believe the intent was to improve articles' quality.
And again, we're quibbling over terminology.
Fair enough.