A lot of the bad atmosphere with regards to the Fleshlight is due to a confusion between whether Danny is acting independantly or acting as WP:Office.
It is confusing for wikipedians naturally. It is confusing for Danny as well, who is pressured by the phone calls and otrs messages. Who is either left alone making a decision, and later is blamed by Jimbo, Brad or whoever. Or who acts under Jimbo or Brad supervision, but is the one to receive the blame from the community later on.
Problem is that Danny has very strong convictions himself (so may not be the best to handle such requests) and is - as expected from most wikipedians - sensitive to the community feedback afterwards.
I would like to suggest that office actions - normally under Brad responsability - be actually done by Brad himself or by a future new employee, who should NOT be a wikipedian.
ant
On 10/10/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I would like to suggest that office actions - normally under Brad responsability - be actually done by Brad himself or by a future new employee, who should NOT be a wikipedian.
ant
If we are talking about the ideal person you missed "must be able to speak English, German, French, Japanese, dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish and spanish".
On 10/10/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/10/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I would like to suggest that office actions - normally under Brad responsability - be actually done by Brad himself or by a future new employee, who should NOT be a wikipedian.
If we are talking about the ideal person you missed "must be able to speak English, German, French, Japanese, dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish and spanish".
I think the basic job requrement is "must have been rocketed from Krypton as an infant; please bring proof of space capsule."
- d.
Anthere wrote:
A lot of the bad atmosphere with regards to the Fleshlight is due to a confusion between whether Danny is acting independantly or acting as WP:Office.
It is confusing for wikipedians naturally. It is confusing for Danny as well, who is pressured by the phone calls and otrs messages. Who is either left alone making a decision, and later is blamed by Jimbo, Brad or whoever. Or who acts under Jimbo or Brad supervision, but is the one to receive the blame from the community later on.
There are a few things I want to point out here:
Danny did not make this decision in a vacuum. There were a series of emails over the course of six months leading up to this; there was also an IRC discussion lasting at least half an hour in which Danny discussed the details of those emails. It basically came down to:
- People complaining that their linkspam was being reverted - The company complaining that their carefully crafted advertisement was being damaged during the course of regular editing and demanding complete editorial control of the page because it was causing "customer confusion"
Now, in case you missed it the first time:
THE COMPANY WERE COMPLAINING THAT THEIR *ADVERTISEMENT* WAS BEING EDITED. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Note the word ADVERTISEMENT.
In case you missed it again:
AD-VER-TISE-MENT. Spam. Deletable under the new speedy deletion criteria for spam which Brad had made not long earlier.
Was the declaration of what became CSD G11 an OFFICE action? Perhaps. Had the use of it prior to this point been claimed to be an OFFICE action? Not that I'm aware of. Did Danny use his OFFICE account ([[User:Dannyisme]])? No, he used his "I am an average Wikipedian" account. Was anyone desysopped for restoring the page? No. Did Danny act unilaterally in deleting this? No, he had the support of several people who were discussing this with him at the time.
Was it an OFFICE action? No.
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Danny did not make this decision in a vacuum. There were a series of emails over the course of six months leading up to this; there was also an IRC discussion lasting at least half an hour in which Danny discussed the details of those emails.
None of these were on the wiki, however, making those of us that were not privy or aware of such discussions to view these as being in a vacuum.
AD-VER-TISE-MENT. Spam. Deletable under the new speedy deletion criteria for spam which Brad had made not long earlier.
Yes, an "advertisement" in their mind that had survived an AfD through the community, a group of editors who believed that the article merited inclusion. Thus, the spam should have been edited, period, not deleted as it was.
This is the part people seem to be failing to grasp here from my end. This wasn't some completely unknown product that no one ever saw, edited, or AfD'd. It would be entirely uncontroversial and no one would care in the least if it were. This was an article that had community approval, and should have never gotten to this point. Danny, who was working as just another administrator in this case, decided that the consensus (you know, the way we do things) didn't matter, and just acted. Not a good thing.
It's bad enough we rushed into a bad spam CSD policy. It's worse when we try to justify obviously poor decisions based around it.
-Jeff
On 10/10/06, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Danny did not make this decision in a vacuum. There were a series of emails over the course of six months leading up to this; there was also an IRC discussion lasting at least half an hour in which Danny discussed the details of those emails.
None of these were on the wiki, however, making those of us that were not privy or aware of such discussions to view these as being in a vacuum.
AD-VER-TISE-MENT. Spam. Deletable under the new speedy deletion criteria for spam which Brad had made not long earlier.
Yes, an "advertisement" in their mind that had survived an AfD through the community, a group of editors who believed that the article merited inclusion. Thus, the spam should have been edited, period, not deleted as it was.
This is the part people seem to be failing to grasp here from my end. This wasn't some completely unknown product that no one ever saw, edited, or AfD'd. It would be entirely uncontroversial and no one would care in the least if it were. This was an article that had community approval, and should have never gotten to this point. Danny, who was working as just another administrator in this case, decided that the consensus (you know, the way we do things) didn't matter, and just acted. Not a good thing.
It's bad enough we rushed into a bad spam CSD policy. It's worse when we try to justify obviously poor decisions based around it.
-Jeff
-- If you can read this, I'm not at home.
Surely this is just another symptom of the fact that the "majority view" or consensus of the community can sometimes be wrong? Nevermind the fact that it is only a handful of editors (relative to the whole editing community) who are party to any given issue. OK - perhaps you disagree in this instance - but can you really not imagine a similar situation where one or two people are in the right, and most people involved are flat out wrong?
I am firmly of the belief that there are fundemental flaws with Wikipedia's modus operandi. The whole "consensus approach" to things like AFD are entirely capable of producing undesirable results. They'll continue to do so too. We will continue to have rubbish of all varieties kept, and ill-written, obscure, disliked, inaccurate (not necessarily incorrect) and unfortunate content deleted. And that's just the stuff that reaches AFD!
Sorry for being harsh - but I'd really like to see some attempt to deal with these fundamental problems that Wikipedia has!
Zoney
Zoney wrote:
Surely this is just another symptom of the fact that the "majority view" or consensus of the community can sometimes be wrong? Nevermind the fact that it is only a handful of editors (relative to the whole editing community) who are party to any given issue. OK - perhaps you disagree in this instance
- but can you really not imagine a similar situation where one or two
people are in the right, and most people involved are flat out wrong?
There's certainly many times that the majority is flat-out wrong. I'm not convinced that this Fleshlight situation is one of them, though. Especailly in tenacious situations like this, "when in doubt, don't delete" should be the guiding principle.
I am firmly of the belief that there are fundemental flaws with Wikipedia's modus operandi. The whole "consensus approach" to things like AFD are entirely capable of producing undesirable results. They'll continue to do so too. We will continue to have rubbish of all varieties kept, and ill-written, obscure, disliked, inaccurate (not necessarily incorrect) and unfortunate content deleted. And that's just the stuff that reaches AFD!
Funny, you and I have the same complaint, except that I think we're deleting too much otherwise useful stuff.
Sorry for being harsh - but I'd really like to see some attempt to deal with these fundamental problems that Wikipedia has!
I don't think keeping a notable sexual product is a "fundamental problem." There are a lot of bigger issues to tackle, including what constitutes a reliable source, moving away from notability as a blanket criteria, and dealing with more objective benchmarks. If you want to go after unnotable sexual products, there's probably a lot out there of lesser importance.
-Jeff
On Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:01:44 +0200, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
It is confusing for Danny as well, who is pressured by the phone calls and otrs messages. Who is either left alone making a decision, and later is blamed by Jimbo, Brad or whoever.
Obviously I missed the bit where Jimbo "blamed" Danny.
Guy (JzG)