On 4/19/06, Katefan0 katefan0wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Everybody who's an administrator knows -- or ought to know -- that any of Danny's actions could be undertaken on behalf of the foundation. To me, this suggests -- in fact, demands -- a lot more caution with undoing his admin actions than otherwise, and at the very least warrants a discreet "what's this about?" before taking action.
First of all, I appreciate the support that has been expressed in this thread. I hope we can put this episode behind us quickly and move on.
In response to the above: Danny had _explicitly_ labeled this page as a regular protected page, and _explicitly_ removed the {{office}} template. This is why I believed it was his point that it was _not_ a WP:OFFICE action, but one of his many ongoing contributions to Wikipedia as an editor and admin (over 30,000 edits on en.wp, only a tiny, tiny fraction of which are office-related). Please note that I assumed good faith on Danny's part, which is why I did not revert the "stubbification" itself. I trusted him, as an editor, on the content issue, but I objected to the act of protecting the article, if taken as a regular administrative action. I would _never_ revert a WP:OFFICE action that is labeled as such, but again, here the opposite was the case; it was labeled as a non-office action.
Apparently (I'm still not sure), the protection was a _sensitive_ Office Action which is not meant to be publicized as such. That idea did not occur to me. I'm not sure if this approach is at all viable (if anything, this episode may show that it is not), and I am not very fond of the idea of mixing regular editorial/sysop tasks with Office Actions which cannot be clearly distinguished, and whose reversal is, effectively, treated with the Wikipedia equivalent of the [[Usenet Death Penalty]]. However, please understand that I will from now on remain largely silent on this issue, and will wait for the Board to clarify things.
Again, I apologize if my actions were rash, but I believed them to be justified based on the information available to me. As of this point in time, I am banned for 48 hours; this is a punishment I can accept. I am also still indefinitely blocked on Meta and desysopped. I would like to kindly request that the remaining indefinite block and the desysopping will be reversed. Again, I will do my best to follow policy, even if the policy is that "Anything Danny does is unusual and should be treated differently from what regular admins/editors do". However, I do believe it needs to be clear _exactly_ what the situation is.
Thanks,
Erik