On 4/20/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
- That nice hot-button word "unilaterally". It wasn't more than a few
months ago when the unwashed hordes were screaming it at Kelly herself.
There is a big difference between my unilaterally deleting a bunch of rather unimportant userboxes and Erik reverting the protection of a hot article implemented by Danny. You will also note that I did not wheel war with respect to any of the userboxes I deleted; I did not redelete any of the ones that were speedily restored by various admins, and the small handful which I did delete twice I redeleted after discussion with the objectors to the original deletion. I may not have much respect for some of enwiki's arbitrary processes, for the vast quantities of cruft that float around in enwiki, or for the community that seems to exist more much for its own perpetuation than for its purported purpose of writing an encyclopedia, but I have a great deal of respect for the need of the Foundation to take appropriate measures to protect its very real legal interests in the face of potential litigation. I tend to believe that the Foundation is, at its core, more interested in being "an encyclopedia being written by a community" than a "community which is writing an encyclopedia". I'm not so convinced that the same is true of the Wikipedia community as a whole.
And, yes, I am somewhat more in the know on this issue than you are, but that doesn't mean I have all of the pieces of the puzzle either. All rhetoric aside, not all admins on Wikipedia are equal; some of us are clearly more bothered about this than others.
Kelly