I think any joke about a cabal is a disaster, and an example of trying to inappropriate defuse what is a serious concern. This is all the more true when the people involved are important enough to be part of a real cabal if there were one. Come to think of it, I haven't seen any low-status editors making jokes about cabals. i wonder why.
On Jan 30, 2008 3:13 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
So, as far as you're concerned I can setup some joke page entirely unrelated to Wikipedia on Wikipedia. Redirect a domain name to it. Use CSS hacks to overwrite the user interface. .. and keep it protected to prevent unapproved people from modifying my website. Did I get that right?
First off, I didn't know it was protected. That is inappropriate, and makes no sense.
But the Bathrobe Cabal isn't just a joke page. It's a humorous page that is a community building tool for admins and a resource for non-admins to find help from a friendly and knowledgeable set of sysops, which is far useful than a lot of the off-topic userpage stuff that gets let alone. I do not understand that logic of attacking an obviously useful page just because someone has bought and redirected an outside domain to it. It's more than just "no harm done". There is a palpable benefit to the page.
On Jan 30, 2008 11:36 AM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Peter Ansell wrote:
If they leave because a userspace page, which was not promoting collaboration on wikipedia articles, was deleted then they were *not valuable* to the encyclopedia.
That seems like an extremely petty criterion of "value." Have you checked the contributions lists of the Bathrobe Cabal members? If all they do is work on the Bathrobe Cabal page, sure, no big loss. But considering they have to run the gauntlet of RfA to join the Bathrobe Cabal that seems unlikely. Almost by definition they've had to contribute a lot of valuable work to Wikipedia to get there.
It could however be affected if others figure out that admins aren't consistent and chuck a fuss because their Userspace pages were deleted for the same reason that page was kept in a shortened discussion.
We could leave all harmless user subpages like this one alone, admin-created or not. That would be a consistent approach.
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