Todd Allen writes:
I agree that not all legal concerns can be discussed
publicly, and
have made that point myself. And if the Foundation believes that there
is a legal concern, it can certainly OFFICE the article in question.
My belief is that OFFICE removals should be very rare, and that OFFICE
edits should be practically nonexistent.
As to the issue of "community vs. from
above", if Jimbo or you
contacted me and said "Hey, Todd, you better take this given action,"
I would generally tend to consider that an official request. If we
wanted the community to decide, we should've let them decide through
normal processes. If action needed to be taken from above, it should
have been transparently (e.g., OFFICE) marked as action from above.
This is, if you think about it, a false dichotomy. There are choices
between OFFICE action and doing nothing. Those choices include
"giving advice" or "making a request." It depends on whether you think
the community should be empowered to make its own decisions but still
be able to hear advice or requests from the Foundation. I happen to
think that we're sufficiently unintimidating (witness this list, for
example) that advice or a request can be rejected.
The attempt to make this look like a community
decision when it really
appears to be a WMF mandate ("strong suggestion", or whatever we want
to call it) is what I find disturbing here.
So the theory here is that we're clever enough to cloak an OFFICE
action as a community action, and even to convince some community
members that they believe they're merely acting on advice rather than
under a "WMF mandate," but not quite clever enough to fool you about
our cloaked agenda?
I confess it is a terrible burden for us, being smart enough to cook
up such schemes but not smart enough to fool you entirely. :)
--Mike