Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
Not that I have any intention of doing such a thing... but I still have some concerns about the whole WP:OFFICE business. Sure, I realize the necessity for something like that; as long as Wikipedia and its parent foundation exist as real-world entities rather than just disembodied Internet phenomena, there will be people in charge who have bills to pay, legalities to comply with, servers to keep running, and so on... and, hence, concerns for which their butts are on the line in a manner not shared by the typical geek just editing Wikipedia for the fun of it. Nevertheless, in a site which prides itself on openness and rule by community consensus, having actions take place unilaterally and secretively goes against the grain, and should be kept to an absolute minimum.
It is not just about legalities, but also about common human courtesy and good customer service. If you are thinking of this as "the foundation against the community" then you're not thinking of it in the way that I'm thinking of it, so let me explain further.
We, as a community, write articles. We write articles about some people who happen to be alive. Sometimes those articles are temporarily biased or contain misinformation, and sometimes that bias or misinformation can hurt someone's feelings. Sometimes, indeed, our articles are *not* biased and do *not* contain misinformation, and yet they can *still* hurt someone's feeelings (if they don't care for the neutral facts). The latter is, in my experience, quite rare. Quite. Rare.
Mostly, when people call us on the phone with a beef, quiet upset, they are not complaining about a neutral presentation of the facts. They are upset because someone has written a one-sided hack job. Often it is *not* libel, but just bad writing.
What should we do in such a case? Well, our fundamental goal *as a community* is to write a really great encyclopedia. Being jerks toward people who have their feelings hurt *and* who know nothing about how we operate, does not strike me as a very useful way to respond.
Rather, we should respond quickly and politely to their concerns, including in most cases, *blanking or deleting the article* and *starting over*, being *extremely* careful as a community to get all the facts right, to strike a fair and neutral tone, and to cite sources even more extensively than normal.
That's what WP:OFFICE is all about -- good customer service.
Ideally, it should be thought of as an action that could and should be taken by any good Wikipedian in the face of a bad article. A very firm "blank and rewrite with proper cites" is a perfectly valid move for articles like this.
There's kind of a feel that, if an article happens to offend the "wrong" people (who have some kind of political, financial, or legal leverage to use against Wikipedia/Wikimedia?), the Wikipedia Secret Police can just make it disappear, and community consensus (and all the Wikipedia pillars) be damned.
Why is there any such feel like this? That's absurd and inflammatory. WP:OFFICE *specifically* says that it is to be used sparingly, temporarily, and is not meant to override or replace community consensus.
And honestly, you should know me well enough by now. No amount of political, financial, or legal leverage in the entire universe would persuade me to do the wrong thing by our mission. We have, as a community, principles and integrity. This is what we are all about.
We already know that the community is secondary to the goal of producing an excellent encyclopedia. But is that, in turn, secondary to some secret corporate agenda held by the Foundation Office?
Again, this is really inflammatory and not helpful to a serious discussion of the issues. "secret corporate agenda" geez.