On 3/31/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
Let's be entirely clear: by sending an email to the official contact address for Wikipedia, the complainant was *trying* to fix the article, in the best way that s/he could figure out. Simply because someone is trying to fix something and they don't know the official, arcane process for doing so, doesn't mean we should take their complaint less seriously, or that it is not valid.
Doc, in answering this email, was liasoning between the official OTRS process and the official deletion process -- in other words, he was just fixing it -- but sadly, Doc doesn't scale well, and it's hard and irritating work (imagine complaints just like this by the dozens every day). He is bringing up a real issue -- not OTRS burnout, but the fact that often there's no good, satisfying answer to give to readers about harmful or bad article content. (We don't want to distribute slander or misinformation, and we certainly don't want to get sued for it, but we also often have a difficult time really preventing it). The mailing list *is* a place to widely discuss how to deal with potentially harmful article content, and it's a topic that every serious editor should spend time thinking about.
-- phoebe