On 10/9/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 18:32:19 -0400, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
However, I would expect that our long term participants could stand together, .. that they could see the clearly good intentions of each other, and not allow petty difference of opinion get in the way of friendship, respect, and our over arching goals (which I think we *all* agree does not include Wikipedia being turned into a free advertising forum).
This is one of the finest paragraphs in this entire thread.
Damn right. On DRV this is turning into a witch-hunt, with the spammers being given infinitely more consideration than Danny. That sucks badly.
Guy (JzG)
The spammers are due no consideration. I am still wondering why they got the special consideration in the first place, which led to this happening at all, as opposed to someone tagging it with cleanup or something.
The issue with Danny is... well, ok. Nothing personal, but you're the rouge du jour, Danny.
A lot of admins are not taking due account for the potential that their actions can be as harmful to the project overall as a random spammer, vandal, or troll. Or in some cases, worse.
As I have said before: I love WP:BOLD, but as with swinging ones arms around in public, your right to swing ends slightly short of the person next to yours' chin. If you WP:BOLD something and a vandal or spammer cries out in agony, you probably did the right thing. If you WP:BOLD and a bunch of experienced editors and admins scream, you likely overstepped.
I see a lot of people complaining about loss of community. Well, that swings both ways. If you stubbornly insist that an off the cuff bold action was right, in the face of a lot of pushback, you're not giving the community its due.
Any bold action which results in flames across multiple WP admin pages, contentious DRV, and several mailing lists WAS A MISTAKE. It was too controversial to be safe to do boldly. It's fine if someone didn't know that it would be controversial beforehand. But everyone, particularly anyone who may appear to be part of "the administration" (office, arbcom, burecrats, senior admins, etc), needs to be very sensitive to this. If you stubbornly defend it rather than pull back and run it through the consensus, then you've just become the source of aggrivation of the problem.
More harm has been done to community by stubborn defenses of unexpectedly contentious bold actions over the last year than any other single thing. Vandals have damaged articles more, but they are generally ineffective at riling up the community (with a few exceptions).