Mark Gallagher wrote:
Please, Mark. You're quite capable of making bloody good arguments; we all seen you! But this is just sad. It doesn't matter what Jimbo will say, does it? No matter what, he's the pawn of corporate aggression ...
I didn't say anything quite that extreme, and contrary to Jimbo's assumption, I'm not particularly angry about it either. I'm just worried that the current policy of letting some people go "over the head" of editors by taking things to the Wikimedia Foundation, which then deals with them in a top-down manner, will introduce systemic bias into the encyclopedia.
I'm certainly not opposed to people pointing out errors, and I'm not opposed to the Foundation having some sort of team that facilitates communication between complaintants and editors. That's not what's at issue here, though. We're no longer talking about correcting errors in the interest of accuracy---we're talking about mollifying angry complaintants, preventing bad publicity for the foundation, and other such things that are not equivalent to writing a factually accurate encyclopedia. This leads to some articles having different policies than other articles, based on who complains and which articles are likely to lead to publicity. The more such ancillary concerns influence things, the worse for the content, in my opinion.
-Mark