Dear Ed,
I hope you had a nice weekend.
About the Mother Teresa article.
I got involved in that article not out profound interest in the subject but because I was distressed to see that Adam Carr withdrew (figuratively speaking!) from Mother Teresa because of his frustration at the stubborn insistence of an indignant Catholic user, Aplank (now known as Alexandros), that all criticisms of her be removed from the article. As you may know, Adam Carr, who only joined Wikipedia in early September, has proven to be an outstanding historian. He prepared an alternative version of the MT article at the end of October to resolve a contentious debate over the existing one (and whose version it later replaced). As you also know, Aplank, for reasons now well understood, has had a lot of trouble understanding Wikipedia collaborative editing conventions and accepting alternate, critical points of view.
At the beginning of last week, it was protected by a brand new sysop, Secretlondon (duly anointed just a day or two before) for the third time in several weeks after yet again an edit war involving Aplank broke out.
We began the slow, arduous process of trying to find a way out of the impasse. We tried to define some ground rules. Aplank slowly began to appreciate that he was out of line and, crucially, we had finally impressed on him that changes to the article *must be* discussed on the Talk page first. Another Catholic user, Pfortuny, agreed to restoring the now heavily mutilated article to Adam's original, and Adam -- much my pleasure -- took an interest in becoming involved again, only he refused to do so unless Aplank was banned from the article. I pointed out that there is no precedent for "banning" a user from an article and made an alternative proposal, which didn't work out. But nonetheless, we were working on a solution and we were *just* about at the point of restarting the article when "Uncle Ed" arrived on Friday afternoon.
You unilaterally decided to unprotect that article. You decided to RENAME it (!!!) Teresa of Calcutta. You dismissed all the proceeding discussion sight unseen as as "unproductive talk" and "bickering" and simply ignored it. (I am not neutral because I was involved but I thought the percentage of "bickering was modest.) You made a dozen or so substantial edits to article. Pfortuny and Secretlondon both expressed their polite surprise at all this. I was less polite.
When Adam asked whether the situation with Aplank clarified, you responded:
Aplank has a clean slate. Why? Because I said so, and no one objected :-)
He doesn't need clearance from anyone to edit the article; it's been unprotected.
(In a similar way, several days before you arbitrarily removed the discussion of Aplank from Problem users -- a page whose usefulness I have already questioned here -- without resolving in any way the underlying problem. But that is also a general problem with that page: it offers no way of resolving issues.)
Ed, please, what *were* you thinking Friday afternoon? Did you need to tick off a couple more Good Deeds on your To Do list before you left for the weekend? Where you trying to rescue Aplank the "persecuted Christian" from the hands of infidels???
Now the reason I am posting this is a open letter is to make the following points and raise a question:
There are a lot of problems on Wikipedia right now and I think this is because there are so few established procedures for dealing with conflict. At one end of the spectrum, one can IP-block an anonymous vandal. At the other, an abusive user can be hard-banned by Jimbo. In between that, there is nothing, except hunkering down in an edit war or slinging mud on the Problem users page. For better or worse, a kind of anarchy reins, and since there is so little precedence for what we are trying to build, we have have to stumble along, experimenting as we go.
Ideally, a perfectly formed system for dealing with conflict would spring from the brain of Jimbo Wales like Athena from the head of Zeus. However, in the absence of such a miracle happening, I see two alternatives:
1) a coterie of super-syops -- like yourself -- solve problems based personal authority and boldness of action. Obviously useful for "putting out fires".
2) strategies for dealing with conflict evolve organically and spread through the Wikipedia community like Khronus's memes (!). This obviously take time and patience and forbearance on the part of trigger-happy sysops.
So, which way forward?
I personally would prefer the second option, even though it means a lot more work. The first lacks transparency and lends itself to arbitrary decisions. It means also that Wikipedia does not evolve in a structured way as an environment but simply relies on a few strong personalities to impose solutions, thereby glossing over weaknesses in the system. But perhaps it is naive of me to think that it can be any other way. I hope that others here will share their viewpoints on this.
Adam Carr has since abandoned Mother Teresa, which is his choice, but I think it is a great pity. In our slow, stumbling way, we *might* have been able to reach a compromise agreement with him had you not interfered. Had we been able to, those of us involved -- Secretlondon, Pfortuny, Aplank, myself and others -- might have learned from the experience and used it to help resolve similar such conflicts in the future. How else will useful precedents for dealing with conflict evolve?
None of my comments above diminishes my respect for you as someone who is gifted at articulating and implementing WP's NPOV philosophy. It is just that I don't believe that that moral authority should be construed as -- for the lack of a better term -- political power. In the long run, it is simply counterproductive.
-- Viajero