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(a)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
--
~notafish
http://blog.notanendive.org
NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent
to this address will probably get lost.