I think what Minos was looking for was a "You're right, sir, I'll get right
on that" response. He had no good reason to expect that, and should have
assumed ahead of time that he wasn't speaking to or being read by idiots.
The first sentence of his first post-AfD comment is: "I am absolutely
appalled by the poor judgment and carelessness shown in your actions with
regard to this article." Its perfectly fine to disagree with Lar. I don't
think the close was wrong, although it might have benefited from being
relisted for more discussion. I do think, based on the article you linked,
that Lynch could have an article on Wikipedia. Note that Minos didn't link
to any articles - only to search results. The first article actually about
Lynch in the Times results is the 13th result, on the second page.
Calling search results on Google deceptive is routine - if your search isn't
refined enough, almost any search for a common name returns tens of
thousands of results if not more. The search terms ["Gary Lynch" SEC] return
that sort of result, and this was his point. Minos wasn't being deceptive,
Lar wasn't calling him deceptive - he was merely pointing out that the
*results* were deceptive.
We can disagree about the outcome of the default for no consensus discussion
on WT:BLP, and disagree therefore on the reasoning Lar used at the end of
his rationale on this AfD. What we should be able to agree upon is that a
reasonable administrator could have come to Lar's conclusion, and that an
increasingly incensed series of posts to and about him are not going to
accomplish any particularly useful goal. Since his experience with Lar has
caused Minos, apparently, to stop editing and has prompted Enchantress to
post it as emblematic of some systemic problem at Wikipedia its useful to
note that they themselves caused the only problem here.
Nathan
On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 11:25 AM, Relata Refero <refero.relata(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Its your prerogative to think that a close made
without a proper effort to
check the validity of the only substantive argument is likely to be meekly
accepted by most people - especially when what looks to me like a more
than
reasonable set of linked articles are considered "deceptive." If I was
told
that an argument I had made was deceptive, I'd be pissed too, even if I
didn't take it 'personally'.
More to the point, Lar didn't restate the WP:BIO guideline in different
wording. He changed the default of consensus=keep. He did so knowingly,
and
also knowing that consensus doesn't exist for it. That's why the first
response is so incensed - he can't understand why a particularly strong
standard is being applied to an article that is beyond the normal level of
marginal notability of a BLP.
"Not all intelligent and knowledgeable people in this world will find
success editing Wikipedia". Yes, but nobody so far has made a case for why
this particular person shouldn't, which is why I'm still in this
conversation. Unless we, at least mentally, give people who appear to know
what they're talking about some leeway, we lose too many. That is the
actual
mistake made here. Lar is unfailingly polite in my opinion, much more so
than I would have been perhaps, but what that chap was looking for wasn't
a
polite "this is the way forward" but a "this is how you make your
valuable
but un-WP-like argument clearer so that people don't miss it if they're in
a
hurry".
RR