On 10/10/06, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com>
wrote:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Danny did not make this decision in a vacuum.
There were a series of
emails over the course of six months leading up to this; there was also
an IRC discussion lasting at least half an hour in which Danny discussed
the details of those emails.
None of these were on the wiki, however, making those of us that were not
privy or aware of such discussions to view these as being in a vacuum.
AD-VER-TISE-MENT. Spam. Deletable under the new speedy deletion criteria
for spam which Brad had made not long earlier.
Yes, an "advertisement" in their mind that had survived an AfD through the
community, a group of editors who believed that the article merited
inclusion. Thus, the spam should have been edited, period, not deleted as
it was.
This is the part people seem to be failing to grasp here from my end.
This wasn't some completely unknown product that no one ever saw, edited,
or AfD'd. It would be entirely uncontroversial and no one would care in
the least if it were. This was an article that had community approval,
and should have never gotten to this point. Danny, who was working as
just another administrator in this case, decided that the consensus (you
know, the way we do things) didn't matter, and just acted. Not a good
thing.
It's bad enough we rushed into a bad spam CSD policy. It's worse when we
try to justify obviously poor decisions based around it.
-Jeff
--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.
Surely this is just another symptom of the fact that the "majority view"
or
consensus of the community can sometimes be wrong? Nevermind the fact that
it is only a handful of editors (relative to the whole editing community)
who are party to any given issue. OK - perhaps you disagree in this instance
- but can you really not imagine a similar situation where one or two people
are in the right, and most people involved are flat out wrong?
I am firmly of the belief that there are fundemental flaws with Wikipedia's
modus operandi. The whole "consensus approach" to things like AFD are
entirely capable of producing undesirable results. They'll continue to do so
too. We will continue to have rubbish of all varieties kept, and
ill-written, obscure, disliked, inaccurate (not necessarily incorrect) and
unfortunate content deleted. And that's just the stuff that reaches AFD!
Sorry for being harsh - but I'd really like to see some attempt to deal with
these fundamental problems that Wikipedia has!
Zoney
--
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