[WikiEN-l] Fleshlight

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 10/9/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> One of the underlying principles is deference to the community on
> content issues, and to a defined system of appeal upwards from that.
> The Office does not historically enjoy a role of roving court of
> appeals. In the past, in cases like this, Office members, including
> Jimbo, have started AfDs and made it very clear that they are asking
> the community to rethink inclusion on this one. The switch from that
> to nuking is, I will repeat, a significant turn, and a very bad one.

Unilateral deletions are performed hundreds of times a month by
Wikipedia Admins on the basis of their own judgement.  Perhaps I
shouldn't find it shocking that some [[troll (Internet)|opportunist]]
found it useful take advantage of Danny's high profile in order to
play out a little bit of performance art.

It is unfortunate and uncharacteristic to see you equate the elevation
of experienced judgement and consideration over strict policy
conformance with a lack of deference to the community.

It appears to me that in this thread we have seen numerous complaints
about HOW this was carried out masquerade as complaints about what was
done...  The reality is that the claim that the deletion was clearly
inappropriate can not be supported by fact: no answer was given to the
point that we lack articles on the numerous similar devices which have
an equal claim of notoriety, nor has our oh so violated community
bothered to even write  a section on this oh so notable product in the
article it was later redirected to.

I wouldn't expect everyone to agree with exactly how such situations
should be handled: if it were easy it would be a non-issue. Like most
other things: This is a matter where rational people can disagree
about the exact nature of its resolution.

However, I would expect that our long term participants could stand
together, .. that they could see the clearly good intentions of each
other, and not allow petty difference of opinion get in the way of
friendship, respect, and our over arching goals (which I think we
*all* agree does not include Wikipedia being turned into a free
advertising forum).

I think this thread is just further demonstration that the English
Wikipedia is no longer a community in any sense beyond a collection of
people which are nearly located in 'space'...  and the resemblance to
an actual community appears to becoming more superficial as time
passes.

In recent times English Wikipedia appears more like a ragtag band of
castaways mutually stranded on an island...  where distrust and petty
bickering are at least as common as friendship and cooperation.

Perhaps our mere colocation on the project like the castaways in my
example  makes us, by definition, a community.  But if that is really
the destiny of the English Wikipedia community then it is a failure by
my standards... and I hope such an end would be a failure by all of
your standards as well.