On 09/10/06, Kris & Adrian <emailus(a)btopenworld.com> wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Unilateral deletions are performed hundreds of
times a month by
Wikipedia Admins on the basis of their own judgement. Perhaps I
shouldn't find it shocking that some [[troll (Internet)|opportunist]]
found it useful take advantage of Danny's high profile in order to
play out a little bit of performance art.
It is unfortunate and uncharacteristic to see you equate the elevation
of experienced judgement and consideration over strict policy
conformance with a lack of deference to the community.
I think that a significant amount of the confusion here has to do with
it being a little unclear whether this was intended as a WP:OFFICE act.
It was done under Danny's normal account, with no reference to
WP:OFFICE, so I think it is safe to assume this was Danny acting in his
capacity and a long standing and widely respected editor exercising
editorial judgment in a manner consistent with our longstanding policies
of being bold.
It just so happened, as it turns out, that it was triggered by a call to
the office.
So it did have a reference to WP:OFFICE then.
I'm sorry Jimmy but what you've written above has to be the worst case
of whitewashing ever.
"It wasn't WP:OFFICE but it was."
"It was caused by contact to the office" is *not* "It was WP:OFFICE".
WP:OFFICE is shorthand for an "office task"; one made by and for the
Foundation. Danny is one of the people who occasionally do these
tasks. It does not cover anything that has a tangential connection
with the actual office, because...
Several hundred people "contact the office" every day - usually by
email, occasionally by phone. A number of people, most heavily Danny,
handle this stuff, and almost always do so without further reference
to "the Foundation" - articles are cleaned up, copyvios hurried along
to deletion, abusive talk page messages removed, egregious bits of
stupidity caught, a hundred and one things quietly kept ticking over.
If I handle one of these because someone sent an email to the office,
it doesn't class as WP:OFFICE. If Kat Walsh or David Monniaux do it,
it doesn't class as WP:OFFICE. If Danny does it in his normal routine
of handling complaints - and in most cases, the only difference
between Danny and the rest of us doing it is that he has a phone to
answer, too - then *it isn't WP:OFFICE*, and the many and myriad
complexities involved there don't come into it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:OFFICE
This argument is bad enough without redefining concepts on the fly...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk