2006/7/9, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com:
Perhaps because he thought that deleting these duplicated system messages that were identical to the centralised, standard MediaWiki messages was not harmful in any way - indeed, from the user experience point-of-view, absolutely nothing seems to have been changed. He probably was under the impression that it was self-evidently, obviously mistaken to have local versions that did not differ from the defaults.
I have no indication that he kept himself to those that had not changed. Although I have found no case where this did not happen, he has not said that he did, whereas there would have been ample chance to do so (for example, to the proposal to "replace the messages and then adapt those on which we agree to the new translation" he did not react with "None have changed in this new translation", but with "Great! Do it all again!"
It sounds like an opportunity for discussion and gentle reminder of the benefits of warnings even in such "obvious" cases, since no actual harm to the project was done.
He has been reminded of that, to which his reaction was: "I really am not going to discuss 1400 times about 1400 messages that change in minuscule of larger amount."
Since this had to have been done by someone already an administrator on nl:, I think the paranoia about things being 'forced upon' a project by those outside sounds a little overblown to me - and saying more about the complainers than the complained-about.
As far as I'm concerned, he won't be an administrator for long.