geni wrote:
2008/6/18 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
Translation, please. What exactly has changed? What is "it" here? Can't be that BLP policy enforcement is a novelty. "It" seems to be the parameters of enforcement. But I suppose most of those with the best interests of the mission at heart and involved in enforcement of BLP have figured this out a while ago. I'm sure OTRS volunteers have. Against those determined to use our pages to smear people, it happens that tough measures may be required.
BLP is 36K of messed up text. I doubt many people with the interests of the project at heart have actually read it.
As written it is broadly equivalent to our copyright policy reading as a long version of "we must keep in mind and respect people's intellectual property rights" which would result in either wikipedia being overrun by copyvios or the deletion of about 90% of wikimedia commons.
Worse than that it can't even be fixed because people don't seem to be sure what it is actually meant to be doing. About the only thing it's clear on is that it doesn't apply to dead people. Heck we haven't even settled the status of legal persons yet and you want to make this enforceable beyond our normal methods?
The basic point of any serious, official, central point fits into much less than 1K. And, yes, we want those key aspects to be enforceable; and in the case of BLP we want enforcement to keep Wikipedia out of aspects of the lives of people that are nothing like encyclopedic, and can cause potential defamation issues. The bloat that goes on has never been an argument for not respecting and being tough about the central planks of policy.
I'll repeat here my basic credo on admin powers: admins should be given discretion to do the job. The very small proportion who abuse that discretion can expect to lose the powers. I think this is a very positive view of admins, and (in fact) if they as individuals don't live up to it, they can be replaced (per "no big deal", quaint though that now sounds).
The whole draft of the remedy at issue could probably be replaced by a one-liner, to do with the discretionary powers used for BLP enforcement, and the respect accorded to those admins in the front line. Trouble is, there are so many wannabe constitutional lawyers out there now on the wiki, we'd never get away with the supposed vagueness.
Charles