On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
2008/12/28 Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net:
Yeah, I'm still bitter about spoiler warnings, but perhaps they should
be a
lesson. Wikipedia is a game of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic .
Yes, because them being (a) clearly stupid in too many cases (b) clearly original research to declare as spoiler (c) having six different venues to tell you you're wrong and to go away must be because of clever politics on the part of those you disagree with, not because you're actually wrong or anything.
That was actually one of those rare instances where a mailing list campaign worked. Too bad that one otherwise sane Wikipedian has been infected by chronic wiki-tetanus over this.
Please don't get judgemental with Ken on this.
He's correct - a few people, without raising a proper consensus, bullied this through.
I also disagree with the new standard - Spoiler warnings have been a normal part of most internet plot discussions for 20+ years.
The decision to use them was a reasonable default. A decision not to use them, supported by proper consensus, would have been fine. Several people here on the list decided that they had a minimum critical mass to be BOLD rather than submitting it to a proper consensus discussion, and got away with it.
If I were a prick, or had cared more about it, I could have shot the BOLD move down at the time. What was being done was perfectly legitimately bulk undoable under standing policy consensus, and there were a few more lurkers willing to participate in undoing it if someone "known" started it off, as opposed to just Ken tilting at windmills.
I decided not to because: A) I judged that it would be more disruptive to the community than the issue was fundamentally worth, and B) I judged that there was probably at least a 40% chance that consensus would develop to support the move eventually. C) A few well known Wikipedians getting away with a minor instance of bullying was probably not that serious a problem.
Of these, I have only come to change my mind on C - I think that the community was lessened by letting it happen, because it emboldened a bunch of people who really *don't* share the ultimate end goals we do of making an encyclopedia to go fuck with us using the same logic. In retrospect, I would probably not have fought the auto-revert campaign approach, but I should have thrown a fit about this on policy boards and hauled a bunch of you up to Arbcom for abuse of process.
It's water under the bridge now, but Ken's ongoing griping is the least symptom of the ongoing ripples this event had in our community. That few of you noticed how it emboldened the bad apples is extremely unfortunate and shortsighted.
You weren't evil, but what you did was, and the truly evil people noticed. My trying to walk the tightrope ended up helping enable evildoers on Wikipedia, and that still bothers the hell out of me.