On 9/9/06, Jason Potkanski electrawn@electrawn.com wrote:
Greetings, Electrawn here. I think this is a perfect opportunity to introduce myself since I am being flamed on the list here without a proper invite
I don't feel that I've flamed you, but I have raised questions (in what was, I admit, a rather strident tone) about your judgement and your interpretation of policy, which is a different thing entirely and I'm sorry if I offended you. In my original message I chose not to identify users by name to avoid this becoming a debate about particular personalities. I also chose not to be specific about what articles I was referring to as I was interested in discussing the broader issues affecting all articles instead of the minutiae of a particular article, which belongs on that article's talk page. Instead, you've chosen to personally attack me and drag out the details of a single article, neither of which is particularly productive here.
I do want to clear up some of your misstatements regarding the Jeff Gannon matter. I am not "in arbitration" regarding this matter, or in anything at all except in a dispute with another user (more about him in a minute). An op-ed piece (one which I personally haven't read and have not proposed using for a source) was not the source for calling Gannon a prostitute, but was merely one of many mainstream media sources presented by multiple editors as substantiating the fact that Gannon advertised his sexual services. The "repeated reversions" I have made were reverting that user who wished to remove all mention of this from every WP article that mentioned Gannon.
And thank you for mentioning the issue of the Southern Voice, which is perhaps the most appalling of your policy interpretations, which would prohibit all LGBT publications from being used in Wikipedia. Would you propose the same thing about Ebony? Univision? If not, why not? What is the difference? Even if you subscribed to the ludicrous idea that all LGBT publications are too "partisan" and thus "unreliable", the proposed use of the Southern Voice was not to provide facts about Phillips, but to substantiate the fact that some LGBT organizations criticized Phillips. We do, of course, want to consider issues of undue weight and prevent WP articles for being overwhelmed with criticism, but the things you have proposed would serve to eliminate legitimate criticism from Wikipedia articles and disqualify many mainstream, reputable sources from being used in those articles.
As for your LPU, you mention (while taking a moment to attack me) that you invited "all sorts of people" to participate. You invited 17. They included the user who wished to scrub all mention of Gannon's former occupation from WP, who mentions on his user page that he's from a conservative messageboard and declares his mission here is to "correct" WP's "liberal bias". Another was an editor who uses his user space to denounce about 20 or so editors by name and until fairly recently had them under a "list of weasels" or somesuch. These were the people you thought would be good to recruit, and of course they eagerly signed up. I thought the small number of members and the relatively high proportion of problem users among them was alarming. This was the main reason I thought it was imperative to bring your project to the attention of more users.
Several times in your long message you repeat the acronym soup, to, in your words "beat this in like a headon commercial." We're not idiots here, we are aware of these policies. What is needed is a thoughtful application of these policies, not a simplistic mantra. Chanting BLP! BLP! BLP! doesn't automatically make you right, or does it mean those who disagree with you want to stuff WP with libel. (Now with 20 percent more libel!) Mentioning reliably sourced unflattering facts is not libel. Mentioning criticism of the subject of the article is not libel. But you've recruited a bunch of POV warriors to go around stripping WP articles of unflattering things about their fellow political party members (BLP! BLP! BLP!) with no oversight and no means to watch the watchmen. This coupled with your wildly over-expansive interpretation of BLP makes me conclude that you should not be playing a key role in interpreting the policy or implementing how it is enforced.