On 9/4/05, James D. Forrester james@jdforrester.org wrote:
If what we do is fair and just, then that is not our intent, merely a happy by-product. Wikipedia is not a democracy, and not a bureaucracy, and the Committee serves to upload neither potential set-up, nor any other community model. There is a massive range of options to go through in the dispute resolution processes before that of Arbitration is reached, all of which in their own ways are fair and just (and, in most cases, disproportionately, but not inappropriately, unfair, being weighted towards the wronger and against the wronged, as it were); by the time one is in Arbitration, the application of fairness and justice has seemed to have been unproductive.
On the other hand, we seek as much information as possible from all sides when evaluating cases.
My problem with all this is that you don't necessarily evaluate the information. In the case of Jim Duffy and myself you listened to him squawking that I'd made more than a hundred edits on his articles, one after the other, and accepted his claim that this was wikistalking.
But did you look at my edits? Go to [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Presidential_Inauguration_%28Irela... Presidential Inauguration (Ireland)] and look at the diffs. Jim Duffy wrote the article single-handed and I then made fourteen edits on it. My very first one was to correct "President of the United Kingdom" to "President of the United States" and the following edits are all good ones, some of them correcting really silly mistakes. As anyone can see.
This wasn't wikistalking, this was wikiduty.
Jim Duffy's problem is that he doesn't like to admit making mistakes, and he reverted all my changes! I think that I was quite justified in taking a good look at his other articles, and surprise, surprise, I found a lot more errors and fixed them.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Jim Duffy is a good editor and he produces some excellent work based on superb research. But he makes silly mistakes now and again - I don't know why, maybe he was in hour 48 of a day long wikisession or something - and if I come along and polish up his articles, it's for the good of the project.
I was wrong in the "enfeebled mind" edit summary I made when I fixed the "President of the United Kingdom" thing, and for that and any other slights, I apologise. But I'm never going to apologise for correcting an obvious error in Wikipedia, and I trust that my outrage at being suspended for a year for doing the right thing is understandable.