[WikiEN-l] Deletion of user subpages

[Fastfission]

On 5/19/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> Define, and define, and define.  Broad definitions are tyrrany.  We
> can't let random people decide what "useful" means!

I agree -- but I think that's pretty much the way it currently works.
I think we need at least some guidelines, examples, etc., if not
definitions. An idea of what is definitely permissable and what is
definitely not would at least allow people to reason in between the
two extremes.

> If you're talking about one subpage I've seen, it ended when the user
> said "X, Y and Z admins are ignorant morons who don't know copyright
> law.  I say we fight back and pepper our userspace with purdy pictures
> we have no right to use!" (in a somewhat less inflammatory fashion,
> admittedly).  Core principles are not negotiable, and attempts to
> organise the community in revolt against being an encyclopaedia, being
> NPOV, respecting copyrights, etc., should not be tolerated.

I've got the page open in front of me, and I didn't say that. The
page, perhaps not terribly articulately, said that some admins had
been using claims of bad fair use as a reason to delete all sorts of
things, and that these admins did not themselves seem to have an
understanding of fair use law. Whatever one thinks of the substance of
the opinion (I have a complicated opinion on this issue which need not
be inserted here), it 1. did not mention any admins by name, 2.
criticized the policies as being perhaps not in accordance with the
law, and 3. criticized certain implementions of the policy. I didn't
agree with all of the page, but I didn't see it doing any harm just by
existing, and certainly didn't think it fell under the "attack page"
of CSD. I don't think our fair use policy counts as a "principle"
policy of the encyclopedia, and I think it was pretty clear he wasn't
trying to organize a "revolt" so much as a place for like-minded
people to discuss potential policy changes (the user himself told me
that he had invisioned it as an alternative to WPFU -- I encouraged
him to think of WPFU less as a "cabal" and more as "a place to talk
about these things," since most of the people there don't agree with
each other anyway).

I know that anybody who makes blanket complaints about "admins" is
going to get a pretty skeptical ear around here -- I've seen enough
crackpots myself to know that 80% of the time, an blanket attacks on
admins or a cabal or whatever are wooly-minded at best. But they are
sometimes legitimate criticisms, or at the very least their ability to
be voiced should be considered worthwhile (nothing is worse for any
sort of bureaucracy or pseudo-bureaucracy than a calcification of
process by means of a lack of criticism, in my opinion). I think if
one reads the (now deleted) page with a more sympathetic ear -- the
sort of ear which assumes good faith -- it is definitely not
speediable, and probably should not be deleted in any case (if anyone
has evidence of it causing harm, I'd be interested in seeing it).

Here's the other point I meant to bring up in my initial posting: if
it is likely that more trouble will come from getting rid of a
"threat" than the "threat" itself would cause, perhaps the threat here
is not the page but the process. I should think this is a lesson from
the userbox debacle -- surely the attempts to eliminate the userboxes
have done more harm to the encyclopedia than the boxes ever did. I
don't blame anybody for this in the userbox case -- it would have
taken remarkable clairvoyance to see this -- but I do think as a
general principle this could be quite useful. I think in most cases,
deletion of pages in the user space whose "right to exist" is
ambiguous causes more problems than it solves. Which is why I think we
should try and make the guidelines here less ambiguous --
straightforward rules, however arbitrary, are a million times easier
to enforce and follow.

FF