On 11 September 2012 16:14, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Tue, 11 Sep 2012, Charles Matthews wrote:
The Roth situation was WP between a rock (celeb culture with its ohmigod you dissed X) and a hard place (academic credibility requires that, yes, you do require verifiable additions and don't accept argument from authority). It would tend to illustrate that celeb power can potentially be deployed against serious discourse. Countervailing "admin power" is always a questionable analysis.
If someone who could reasonably be seen as speaking for Wikipedia told him that Wikipedia needed secondary sources for his claim, they are wrong, and Wikipedia failed.
That is what I have described before as the point of failure, if the inference is correct. There has been plenty of discussion on the premise that there was a failure of courtesy, which I don't see.
It completely misses the point to explain how Wikipedia's actual policies are reasonable. The policy that Roth was told about is not reasonable; if it doesn't match Wikipedia's actual policy, he shouldn't be expected to figure that out.
It has nothing to do with celebrity power, except that when celebrities run into bad admins, people learn about it.
Without the whole mail being made public, I don't see how we can conclude "bad". Selective quotation is what we have in the New Yorker letter, together with some over-interpretation. Which is rhetoric. But the bulk of Roth's letter is much more interesting than that rather scanty intro.
Charles