"The recent fuss over Office actions demonstrates amply that even quite well established administrators feel that they can challenge and disregard the interests of the Foundation." Unfortunately it demonstrates nothing even remotely resembling the dark senario you choose to paint. No party involved *has* challenged, let alone felt entitled to challenge, the interests of the foundation. I believe it is a unanimous consensus among wikipedia community (disregarding vandals of course) that the interests of the foundation are foremost because without it the project can not exist.
One of the parties has challenged what he could be reasonably certain were the interests of another party as an individual editor having nothing to do with any real-life Foundation affairs. By challenging an out-of-policy action he did the irght thing and the interests of the Foundation had nothing to do with it. It seems some people do not find it unreasonable to expect an editor to act on information he did not have.
Reverting once the actions of another editor, especially when that action was in direct violation of wikipedia policies established through community consensus, is part of the normal wiki editing process and such actions are encouraged by [[WP:BOLD]] because they serve to advance the interests of the encyclopaedia better than spending endless hours (and because of the nature of talk page communication, holding even a short dialougue can take days) discussing an edit even when that edit is not very likely to cause controversies and edit wars.
It is surprising how some people go on claiming that Erik should have emplyed some hidden precognitive abilities to deduce that an action explicitly labeled by Danny as a normal editorial action was actually performed in the interests of the Foundation and thereby refrained from exercising the editorial powers gifted to him by the *wiki*pedia.
Molu
Message: 1 Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 20:54:42 +0100 From: "Tony Sidaway" Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Why the uproar over wikitruth To: "English Wikipedia" Message-ID: 605709b90604221254l3f7c6da1uf7bed1d214415ee0@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On 4/22/06, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Under the Communications Decency Act which provides a general exemption from third party liability to online information providers, this exemption does not extend to liability for publication by agents of the provider. A Wikipedia administrator who uses his special powers to publish defamatory content or copy copyright-infringing content would tend to advance the case against Wikipedia for third-party liability.
The fallacy there is in suggesting that all admins are agents of Wikipedia. There is nothing in any description of admins that allows them to do anything on any site outside of a particular project. A Wikipedia admin does not thereby receive the right to be an admin on any sister project or even on a Wikipedia in any other language. Perhaps you should review the meaning of "agent".
I use the term loosely. If someone entrusted with the ability to see unpublished content then uses that ability to cause it to be published, then the organisation's task of showing that it took reasonable steps to prevent publication is made more difficult, for it most demonstrate that it reasonably believed that this person would not do so. If our admins are chosen through a popularity contest in which their loyalty to the aims and interests of the Foundation, rather than the community, is not examined, I think it would be very difficult to argue that such a belief was reasonable. Basically we let any mutt off the street act as an administrator, irrespective of his views on, or knowledge of liability, copyright, or anything else relevant, or his commitment to act in the interests of the Foundation.
The recent fuss over Office actions demonstrates amply that even quite well established administrators feel that they can challenge and disregard the interests of the Foundation. --------------------------------- Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2ยข/min or less.
On 4/24/06, Molu loom91@yahoo.com wrote:
"The recent fuss over Office actions demonstrates amply that even quite well established administrators feel that they can challenge and disregard the interests of the Foundation." Unfortunately it demonstrates nothing even remotely resembling the dark senario you choose to paint. No party involved *has* challenged, let alone felt entitled to challenge, the interests of the foundation.
To be specific, Geni removed office protection from an article about a month ago without consulting Danny, and The Epopt, an arbitrator, has recently removed a block on an another editor imposed by Danny. I don't need to paint any dark scenarios, they're already here. Moreover the attacks on Office protection continue.
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Tony Sidaway stated for the record:
On 4/24/06, Molu loom91@yahoo.com wrote:
"The recent fuss over Office actions demonstrates amply that even quite well established administrators feel that they can challenge and disregard the interests of the Foundation." Unfortunately it demonstrates nothing even remotely resembling the dark senario you choose to paint. No party involved *has* challenged, let alone felt entitled to challenge, the interests of the foundation.
To be specific, Geni removed office protection from an article about a month ago without consulting Danny, and The Epopt, an arbitrator, has recently removed a block on an another editor imposed by Danny. I don't need to paint any dark scenarios, they're already here. Moreover the attacks on Office protection continue.
To be clear as well as specific, I objected to the block, not article protection under the OFFICE policy. I fully support OFFICE as a mechanism to protect the Foundation's interests.
- -- Sean Barrett | Where there's a will, I want to be in it. sean@epoptic.org |
On 4/24/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/24/06, Molu loom91@yahoo.com wrote:
"The recent fuss over Office actions demonstrates amply that even quite well established administrators feel that they can challenge and disregard the interests of the Foundation." Unfortunately it demonstrates nothing even remotely resembling the dark senario you choose to paint. No party involved *has* challenged, let alone felt entitled to challenge, the interests of the foundation.
To be specific, Geni removed office protection from an article about a month ago without consulting Danny,
Not quite true (the real situation is far more complex). In any case there was either one heck of a statistical fluke (Danny managed to resolve the situation which had been going on for a month within 24 hours of my actions) or he had indeed forgotten about it (remember at that point office actions were limited to "short term" later Jimbo stated this was one week. In short Danny was acting outside policy (although I don't think deliberately). WP:OFFICE is an interesting case as far as policy is concerned. We are told (correctly) that it is vital to the survival of Wikipedia and yet most of it appears to have been stitched together based on a mixture of president and brief emails from Jimbo. Further more I can only find one non English equivalent. Considering the amount of thought that goes into most en.wikipedia policy it doesn't seem logical that a policy this critical should be thrown together in such an ad hoc
-- geni