Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
[snip]
Nevertheless, the bureaucrats of the Hebrew Wikipedia chose to salt the article with an explanation similar to WP:OFFICE.
There are different points in your emails, and I would like to take each points in turn.
On Jan 28, 2008 8:47 PM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
First, Wikimedia Israel is not the first chapter to receive legal threats and mails from a lawyer. When this happens, the best is to inform the Wikimedia Foundation Legal Counsel.
And if I may...
Zero: Ask all parties concerned how exactly this all happened and what exactly happened so we have the whole story and not only parts of it.
Having done that, and taking into account Amir's explanation, this is what I understand of the whole event:
1- Wikimedia Israel receives a legal threat per email. 2- After a quick assessment of the article, the persons in charge of treating emails at the WM IL queue decide to forward it to a wikipedia-he bureaucrat for assessment and advice. 3- The bureaucrat decides to delete the article, of his own accord, without any pressure from WM-IL 4- The community does not agree with the deletion 5- The bureaucrat provides "an explanation similar to WP:OFFICE" for his actions 6- Mayhem ensues in the community 7- In the meantime, WM-IL consults with their own lawyer and answer to the email the "boilerplate" email that all chapters use, ie. "WM IL is not the organisation that hosts Wikipedia and therefore cannot edit the content, but here are your options".
I'm not so much trying to blame anyone, I am trying to make light on what happened.
I believe the mistake here is that the trusted person chosen to assess the threat by WM-IL reacted maybe a bit rashly, instead of quietly gathering community members to fix the article, went and deleted it. If indeed the article was as other people in this thread mentionned, ie. highly POV, I totally understand this reaction from the people involved.
So no, administrators and bureaucrat did not ""obey" a request from Wikimedia Israel", they went and did what they thought was the right thing as normal users.
No, administrators and bureaucrat did not invoke WP:OFFICE in the name of Wikimedia Israel or in the name of the Wikimedia Foundation but in Amir's own words "an explanation similar to WP:OFFICE". His interpretation.
Yes, this was blown way out of proportion (my interpretation :-) )
In short, the only thing I see is a lack of clear communication between all parties: chapter/community/bureaucrats/admins, but no-one trying to coerce anyone else into doing something they have no right to do.
Let this be a lesson learned for all parties involved and hope that this will help improve the way these things are treated in the future.
Cheers,
Delphine