David Gerard wrote:
On 05/03/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Hi. I requested on the talk page that rather than deleting it, it be moved back out to community noticeboard. Others, if I recall rightly, asked the same. Could you tell me more about your reasoning for deleting it instead?
Just because people want it around is not a justification to keep an uncertified RFC around. Uncertified RFCs are exercises in reputation-trashing. That's *why* they get deleted.
I think the case where some frothing loon uses an RFC to make somebody look bad unfairly is indeed an important one. I don't think that applies here.
The RFC brought together important evidence that people weren't aware of. Its most popular positions were calling for something milder than what eventually happened, And the view that it was a purely an exercise in reputation-trashing was, as demonstrated in the RFC, a minority one.
Further, given that it started life outside of the RFC space, you could just as well have moved it back out again to some talky-talk space and it would have met you procedural concern.
This especially concerns me as you used your administrative powers to enforce your minority view in a disagreement in which you were very actively involved. Wouldn't it have been better to let somebody who had less involvement decide the outcome?
Regardless, would you mind sending me a copy of it? As I mentioned before, I think in a couple of months when people have cooled down, it's worth coming back to see what we can learn of all this. However, the vigor with which people are deleting the record is going to make that harder than I'd like.
I have to say "too bad, that's not what RFCs are for."
From all the chaos, it appears we did not have the perfectly appropriate structure to deal with this. I didn't realize you were a big fan of the narrow following of process, but since you appear to be, perhaps you could propose the process you think would make this go better next time?
Thanks,
William