On 17 November 2012 01:34, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Well, no, because the Foundation has made it abundantly clear that they assume no responsibility whatsoever for content, or for questions like whether we have flagged revisions or not. All of that is fully delegated to the community.
In a couple of misleading senses you could argue this. The legal buck stops with the WMF. (You clearly want to look further than the legal position, but in the context of PR editing it has been argued that the law is the standard, not "ethics"). What software is in operation is handled by the developers employed by the WMF. It has indeed been contentious whether the WMF should impose its view on the software, so it has backed off at present.
It does seem you want to target a "blame game" at the community, whatever bad actors do who are certainly not within the community by any reasonable standard of compliance with norms.
<snip examples of things that can go wrong>
But the community generally is not aware of that responsibility, or denies it, and certainly lacks any efficient organ to exercise it.
The first is basically untrue. The second, I think, only represents fairly the attitude of a few "free speech extremists" on enWP (I'm not familiar enough with other Wikipedias to comment on their communities). I think they are fewer than they used to be.
The third is about on-site politics, which I don't think is in a very satisfactory state, but about which I have adopted a "less is more" line in my own comments for a few years (for reasons that are obvious, at least to me). It is not closely connected in any case with dealing properly with complaints, which is the problem-solving approach to things going wrong on WP, as opposed to looking round for someone to blame.
So can we discuss points arising in some other thread, please? All of the above may be worth talking about, but conventionally off-topic matters get a new subject line. Such as "If only the enWP community got its act together we would never have to worry about PR editing because it would be a Brave New World", perhaps.
Charles