Jimmy Wales wrote:
Since WP:OFFICE is done publicly and under intense scrutiny from the community and the external world, I hardly see any need for a special narrow committee to be specifically tasked with overseeing it.
Is that indeed intended to be the case? There seems to be some confusion in this discussion over whether WP:OFFICE actions are, or ought to be, always done publicly. In the particular case that spawned this altercation, there was no public tagging of the article, just a silent protection, and indeed someone reverted the addition of the "protected by WP:OFFICE" tag. What's unclear to me is if that whole mess was merely confusion, or intended to be but not yet stated as official policy. Several people have argued that it either is, or should be, official policy, and others have argued that it isn't and shouldn't be.
Basically: Are WP:OFFICE actions supposed to always be publicly announced and scrutinized by the community? It was my impression that they were, but some of the discussion in this set of threads has made the issue more murky.
-Mark