"Part of the problem is that quite a few people (Anthony is certainly not the only one - others have been debated here on the list as well) seem to feel perfectly justified in violating the 3-revert guideline."
The 3-revert guideline is not very useful when a group of people gang up against another and refuse to discuss their point of view. The closest I got to an explanation was "REVERT - YOU DO NOT CHANGE THE FEATURED ARTICLE. PERIOD. User:Raul654 changes the featured article. NOT User:Anthony DiPierro." While we're discussing violation of the 3-revert guideline, let's also discuss violation of the guidelines on use of the rollback button, which is meant for reverting anonymous vandals. I was neither anonymous nor a vandal, yet the first and majority of the reverts of my contribution were made using the rollback button. Let's talk about violation of the page protection guidelines. Raul is not only reverting without explanation, he's reverting without violation and then protecting the page. Let's talk about why the violations of some users are ignored, such as Blankfaze during the exact same edit war that got me banned.
Then, when we're done talking about all that, let's look at the hypocrisy that is going on here. We call ourselves a free encyclopedia, yet edit wars are fought and people are blocked so that we can feature non-free images on the front page. Our page explaining administrators says that sysops "are not imbued with any special authority, and are equal to everybody else in terms of editorial responsibility" yet failure to obey orders made by administrators results in blocks and bans. We talk about consensus all over the place, but all we do is vote. The viewpoints of the minority are virtually never taken into consideration. Why should 3 people compromise against 2 when 9 reverts is more than 6?
So yes, I ignore the 3-revert guideline, at least, the one written on Wikipedia:revert. You have to ignore some of the guidelines, or you wouldn't get anything done at all. There's even a rule telling people to ignore all rules, complete with Jimbo's signature on it.
Then expect to be banned.
Fred
From: "Anthony DiPierro" anthonydipierro@hotmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 06:37:10 -0400 To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] more questions
So yes, I ignore the 3-revert guideline, at least, the one written on Wikipedia:revert.
Let's talk about why the violations of some users are ignored, such as Blankfaze during the exact same edit war that got me banned.
For the record, during that edit war, I reverted exactly 4 times. Orginally, only 3, but [[User:Danny]] told me to revert a 4th time and he would protect the page. Ask him... I was rather hesistant to break the 3 revert rule.
As for Anthony, I understand that he has raised this issue on talk pages in the past. However, to his supporters, I make the argument that it is incredibly immature and inappropriate to take the actions Anthony did just becasue you're not getting your way.
I realise that the "rules" naming [[User:Raul654]] as de facto administrator of the feature template aren't really written down anywhere, that they're moreso common knowledge (or so I thought)... And maybe that was a mistake from the beginning. Maybe it was just asking for trouble.
But you can't make *any* argument to me that justifies Anthony's actions.
blankfaze wrote:
I realise that the "rules" naming [[User:Raul654]] as de facto administrator of the feature template aren't really written down anywhere, that they're moreso common knowledge (or so I thought)... And maybe that was a mistake from the beginning. Maybe it was just asking for trouble.
Yes, in retrospect of course that is obvious. And I don't think that there is anyone, not even Raul654, who would argue that in the long run, it makes sense to have a single person in charge of such an important thing without any formal means of oversight, etc.
But, it was a convenience and a custom, and since there would of course be universal consensus to move forward with a different scheme, there was absolutely no reason to have an episode of civil disobedience to change it. There was no emergency.
--Jimbo
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:22:04 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
But, it was a convenience and a custom, and since there would of course be universal consensus to move forward with a different scheme, there was absolutely no reason to have an episode of civil disobedience to change it. There was no emergency.
Oh, but don't you see? There was! It was a Fair Use picture or something like that and is therefore was inherently an evil heretical tool of the Devil. All of Wikipedia was in most grave peril due to its existance there. We're lucky that the FBI wasn't bursting into the colo even as it was uploaded.
Or something to that effect, I think. Supposedly.
Regardless of his actions they raise a good question, arent we giving an article some kind of gold standard by featuring it and havent fair-use images been tolerated rather then accepted?
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:37:37 -0400, Fennec Foxen fennec@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:22:04 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
But, it was a convenience and a custom, and since there would of course be universal consensus to move forward with a different scheme, there was absolutely no reason to have an episode of civil disobedience to change it. There was no emergency.
Oh, but don't you see? There was! It was a Fair Use picture or something like that and is therefore was inherently an evil heretical tool of the Devil. All of Wikipedia was in most grave peril due to its existance there. We're lucky that the FBI wasn't bursting into the colo even as it was uploaded.
Or something to that effect, I think. Supposedly.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 06:58:50 +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason avarab@gmail.com wrote:
Regardless of his actions they raise a good question, arent we giving an article some kind of gold standard by featuring it and havent fair-use images been tolerated rather then accepted?
It would be nice to have an informal policy not to use fair-use pictures for the main page blurb -- if you really want to feature an article with no GFDL/PD images, you could do so without an image (I don't remember why not having a thumbnail for a main page blurb is anathema to some).
sj<
It would be nice to have an informal policy not to use fair-use pictures for the main page blurb
I disagree. I don't see the problem in having the occasional fair use picture on the main page, if there isn't an alternative. The problem with having imageless features is that it just makes the main page look dull, and... unillustrated!