On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 5:43 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:
Anthony wrote:
What established framework are you talking about, here?
I'm referring to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines (and more importantly, the underlying principles).
An editor, acting in good faith, might believe that creating pages for dictionary definitions or dessert recipes improves the encyclopedia. Does this mean that we're required to refrain from intervening? Of course not.
Of course not. You should revert the editor's changes.
IAR is one of our most important policies, but it isn't a license to dismiss others' concerns. Perhaps a one-off exception to our vandalism policy *would* improve the encyclopedia, but it isn't Gwern's place to unilaterally determine this and disregard requests to seek consensus.
It wasn't vandalism. The vandalism policy is clear about this. It is not vandalism, but it is prohibited: "What is not vandalism" "Editing tests by experimenting users: Users sometimes edit pages as an experiment. Such edits, while prohibited, are treated differently from vandalism. "
"Obviously I did all my editing as an anon: if even an anonymous IP can get away this kind of blatant vandalism just by invoking the name WP:EL, then that's a lower bound on how much an editor can get away with."
Thanks for this. I guess he called it vandalism. Unless he's been lying about his motive, he was wrong, though.
As I said before, the experiment wouldn't have been at all accurate if he had consulted beforehand. People would have been on the lookout for the removal of external links by IP addresses.
[....] If not, another option was to consult the WMF. (I've noted this several times.)
I doubt that would have worked. And it's not a good use of WMF employee time anyway. The new TOS is pretty clear that WMF doesn't want to get involved in such minutiae.
You weren't aware that we generally frown upon edits intended to reduce articles' quality?
I believe the intent was to improve articles' quality.
And again, we're quibbling over terminology.
Fair enough.