[Foundation-l] Wikipedia:Office Actions

[Stephen Bain]

On 4/24/07, Casey Brown <cbrown1023 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> I for one, would like clarification on
> this policy and its stance in Wikimedia.  Everything else, to our knowledge,
> has been updated and clarified.

I think you are misunderstanding what the office actions policy is.
You do have the genesis of understanding though:

> There is no doubt by any that the Office cannot do anything it wants
> (basically what this policy states) but the part that needs to be clarified
> is if it really is "Wikimedia-wide".

You say "the office" here but you should be saying "the Foundation".
The Foundation can, and does, step in at any time when there are
problems with the content on any of the projects. This much is not
doubted.

The only reason that the English Wikipedia has a written down office
actions policy is scale. Simply because of the size of the project,
problems requiring Foundation intervention occur more frequently on
the English Wikipedia than they do anywhere else. As such, the office
actions policy was created as a formal mechanism by which the workload
could be spread.

The policy doesn't impact the prerogative of the Foundation to
intervene where there are problems. It's just a method for carrying
that out. At the moment only the English Wikipedia, because of its
size, has needed to write this down somewhere.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com