Hello,
On 6/20/07, Dejan Čabrilo <dcabrilo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 08:59 +0100, Sean Whitton wrote:
Firstly, the guidelines were drafted and left in
the topic of
#wikipedia for several days. No real feedback or edits were received
and so we thought it would be okay to go ahead. Perhaps if the
community had got involved in discussion there, we probably would have
allowed more time, but it didn't seem to be happening. So, there was
no community input despite the opportunity for it.
Did this not lead you to believe that the guideline was not advertised
properly? After we heard about it, many people got very upset. So, I
suggest you give us another chance to give you input on the topic. The
guideline page is protected, and when I asked an op (rather harshly, I
must admit) in #wikipedia to change the /topic, to reflect that most of
us don't agree with it, he didn't do anything about it.
My question still stands: why do you get to make decisions for all of
us?
Because Sean is one of our two IRC group contacts for Wikimedia (with
James_F), member of Freenode staff (you know, this network you are using and
whose rules you have accepted a long time ago).
Secondly, I agree that the off-topic guidelines were
originally worded
far too strictly. I've since toned down the
guidelines (I didn't write
them originally) to try and give the impression that was intended,
that extensive off-topic talk is discouraged, not that we are saying
"talk about anything but Wikipedia and you get banned". Please take a
look at them now and see what you think.
Like I said before: I hang out in that channel because I like the wit of
the people in it. If we are not allowed to dwell into out conversations
to a point in which we discuss the political philosophy behind the
religious dynamics among the royalty of Swaziland or the latest episode
of Dr House, the channel will lose its charm of an encyclopedia channel
- and it will be void of people who otherwise helped newcomers. It will
also be void of admins, and in many cases, my only way to quickly
contact an admin was through that channel.
Admin on which project ? #wikipedia is supposed to be about the global
Wikipedia project, if you wish to find admins of a dedicated project, you
had better join the dedicated channel (I guess your sentence was
English-language-Wikipedia-centric, so in that case the dedicated channel is
#wikipedia-en, just like there is #wikipedia-fr or #wikipedia-de).
Finally, let me repeat this: While I applaud your effort to take
initiative, why do you think you have legitimacy to
deop people, make a
guideline without community input (whether the lack of community input
was your fault or not doesn't matter, there still wasn't any), and then
give ops to people who will follow it?
Because someone had to do it. Sean was only bold enough to dare doing it.
Sean, I think you should make it publicly clear what the problems were, so
that people really understand why your action was needed.
--
Guillaume Paumier
[[m:User:guillom]]
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have
imagined." Henry David Thoreau