Delirium wrote:
- How is someone calling up the Wikimedia Foundation and getting a page
protected not going "over the head" of editors, and not acting in a "top-down manner"? Even if justified in some cases, it's clearly doing just that.
The same effect could be achieved by any knowledgeable person by popping into an irc channel and asking any of a large number of people to assist with a serious problem. If you, for example, protected a page with a short explanation on the talk page that you think there's a serious legal problem and asking people, as a courtesy, to leave the page protected until the Foundation legal team has had an opportunity to review the situation, then I would fully expect that to stick.
The problem is, people who are not part of our community don't know how to do that, and they don't have the social power to do that. Therefore, they call the office.
WP:OFFICE is *temporary* and is *not* going "over the head" of editors. It is just one more fully functional and reasonable way for people to interact with us -- one which is particularly helpful to people who are dealing with a problematic Wikipedia article but who do not know anything about the right way to edit wikipedia.
- You have explicitly stated that we ought to treat articles on living
people in a different manner than other articles. Isn't that "some articles having different policies than other articles"?
Of course not! It is no different than saying that articles about obscure and difficult mathematical concepts are (and should be) treated differently than articles on tourist landmarks.
The core policies are the same, but editorially speaking, the application of the policies depends upon the local context of the individual articles.
--Jimbo