[WikiEN-l] Office actions

Fri Dec 15 17:18:43 UTC 2006

On 12/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > This is all fine, but Office actions should not be a technique for
> > sweeping issues under the rug indefinitely.
>
> I agree completely.  The message of WP:OFFICE should not be "hands OFF"
> but "hands ON".
>
> The core idea is that the process SHOULD work like this:
>
> 1. A hysterical phone call comes in to the office.  There might or might
> not be legal threats.  The hysteria might or might not be justified.
> But someone is sad, and Wikipedia is not here to make people sad.  So we
> want to respond in a helpful and loving way.
>

Problem is that it's used for more than that (Image:Crosstar.png for
example which I wish someone would oversite away and have done with)

> 2. The article is stubbed and tagged as WP:OFFICE.  This is a message to
> good editors: "Please help us.  This article is making someone unhappy.
>   We want to make sure that it is a thoughtful, fair, neutral article.
> We need GOOD editors to pay attention to it, and help us make it good."
>

That would be cleanup and the wait is about 6 months. In the meantime
we have [[Elevator music]].

> I would recommend protection or semi-protection at this point, but with
> the idea that even if protected admins are (as compared to normal
> protection) actually encouraged to come help with the article.
>

Admins have rather a lot of other things to do. Admin only editing of
articles does not strike me as a good idea. In theory at least when it
comes to editing we are all equal.

> 3.  After some reasonable period of time, hopefully 24 hours, but
> perhaps as long as a week, the article has become a shining beauty.  The
> subject of the biography (and really, these are most often biographies)
> is either made happy (because a horrible error was corrected, a troll
> was vanquished, or whatever) or made at least satisfied (the story of
> the negative thing he or she did once is now placed in appropriate
> context, properly cited, including citations to his or her own response
> and defense).
>
> 4. Joy.
>

This assumes the person complaining is ah reasonable.

> Perhaps young and excitable Wikipedia contributors think that the point
> of the exercise is to SHOW PEOPLE that you CAN'T PUSH WIKIPEDIA AROUND,
> and go out to try to dig up well-cited dirt on the person, creating an
> even more horribly bad and biased article than we started with, forcing
> us to start all over again.
>

I don't think it is a good idea to get into the habit of removing well
cited information

> Perhaps good contributors who respect WP:OFFICE think "Gee, trouble
> here, I will just stay out of the way"... and then nothing happens.
>

Can you blame them?

> Perhaps no one really cares in the first place, such that if the article
> has been out-of-process speedied, it would have slipped through the cracks.

People are supriseingly good at picking up impropper speedies

> I am unsure exactly how to redesign the process so that we get the good
> outcome more often, and the bad outcome less often.

Outline the problem on the talk page as see if we can get the person
complaining to suggest any souces that could be useful.

> An example of the good outcome can be seen at [[Ron Jeremy]], which was
> NOT subject WP:OFFICE, but rather subject to a controversial blanking by
> an ordinary editor.  It has become an excellent article which continues
> to improve, because good editors are keeping unsourced cruft out of the
> article completely.

Try [[Jack Thompson (attorney)]] I suspect the subject still has
issues with the article but at least it now covers more of his life
than his campains against certian types of computer games.
-- 
geni