-----Original Message----- From: George Herbert [mailto:george.herbert@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 04:01 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BLP, and admin role in overriding community review
On 5/23/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Wikipedia:Biograpies of living persons is policy. There is no basis for modifying it or overruling it by consensus or by practice. To the extent possible it will be strictly interpreted and enforced.
I don' t think that anyone's arguing with the policy; I think we're disagreeing over how its applicability to a given situation is assessed.
I enthusiastically support the idea and written policy in WP:BLP. But I also think there are grey areas around the edges. No policy can be written to be explicit and broad enough to avoid having to interpret applicability for future situations which were unforseen or emergent. And the policy as written now has a lot of gaps in which ambiguity can be found.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
Exactly and what I am doing is telegraphing my intention to enforce the discretion it gives to users to delete controversial material which is poorly sourced. and of administrators to stub or delete articles which mainly consist of biased or malicious content.
Fred
On 5/23/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
From: George Herbert [mailto:george.herbert@gmail.com] On 5/23/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Wikipedia:Biograpies of living persons is policy. There is no basis for modifying it or overruling it by consensus or by practice. To the extent possible it will be strictly interpreted and enforced.
I don' t think that anyone's arguing with the policy; I think we're disagreeing over how its applicability to a given situation is assessed.
I enthusiastically support the idea and written policy in WP:BLP. But I also think there are grey areas around the edges. No policy can be written to be explicit and broad enough to avoid having to interpret applicability for future situations which were unforseen or emergent. And the policy as written now has a lot of gaps in which ambiguity can be found.
Exactly and what I am doing is telegraphing my intention to enforce the discretion it gives to users to delete controversial material which is poorly sourced. and of administrators to stub or delete articles which mainly consist of biased or malicious content.
No, I think that's wrong; you're telegraphing your intention to take away the normal admin consensus and discretion powers (including reverting each others' admin actions) in this particular area.
We all know (should know) and agree (I hope) that an editor can delete BLP violation material, and an admin can delete BLP violation material and stub an article if need be and speedy it on discretion if there's a justifyable BLP reason to do so. Those are all well established.
But it's also been well established up until now that those actions were like any other admin action - reversable, and subject to other admins overturning, hopefully with proper discussion and consensus but via the normal processes.
You're saying "You can't do that anymore" to the latter (normal admin review/override on BLP issues) not the former (BLP related editing, truncating, speedy deletions).
The former is not controversial as a matter of policy or practice; the latter is new (to me, and others in thread) and given that it's concerning me here and suprising me here is likely to be controversial with the community as a whole.
I don't know that I'm fundamentally opposed to the change; I am concerned that it seems to be inconsistent with what I know of prior written and community informal policy, and seems like a rather significant change to just make with no warning, and concerned that it isn't documented anywhere properly (see prior "Out of band discussion considered harmful" threads - this discussion here is only marginally better for the encyclopedia than a poorly-attentioned IRC conversation to block someone).
Even if this is the right thing to do, please do it the right way; this doesn't strike me so far as the right way.
On Wed, May 23, 2007 3:20 pm, Fred Bauder wrote:
Exactly and what I am doing is telegraphing my intention to enforce the discretion it gives to users to delete controversial material which is poorly sourced. and of administrators to stub or delete articles which mainly consist of biased or malicious content.
So, as an arbitrator, you are endorsing your own personal view on how a policy should be and encouraging others to act as you would like them to, even though your personal view on how the policy should be is a) in direct contravention with what's written and agreed upon by consensus, b) has not been presented to the community in any meaningful way, and c) had had a number of unrelated editors questioning it before a and b even occur.
I can't be the only person who sees a problem with that.
-Jeff