On 09/10/06, Kris & Adrian emailus@btopenworld.com wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
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.
I think that a significant amount of the confusion here has to do with it being a little unclear whether this was intended as a WP:OFFICE act. It was done under Danny's normal account, with no reference to WP:OFFICE, so I think it is safe to assume this was Danny acting in his capacity and a long standing and widely respected editor exercising editorial judgment in a manner consistent with our longstanding policies of being bold.
It just so happened, as it turns out, that it was triggered by a call to the office.
So it did have a reference to WP:OFFICE then.
I'm sorry Jimmy but what you've written above has to be the worst case of whitewashing ever.
"It wasn't WP:OFFICE but it was."
"It was caused by contact to the office" is *not* "It was WP:OFFICE". WP:OFFICE is shorthand for an "office task"; one made by and for the Foundation. Danny is one of the people who occasionally do these tasks. It does not cover anything that has a tangential connection with the actual office, because...
Several hundred people "contact the office" every day - usually by email, occasionally by phone. A number of people, most heavily Danny, handle this stuff, and almost always do so without further reference to "the Foundation" - articles are cleaned up, copyvios hurried along to deletion, abusive talk page messages removed, egregious bits of stupidity caught, a hundred and one things quietly kept ticking over.
If I handle one of these because someone sent an email to the office, it doesn't class as WP:OFFICE. If Kat Walsh or David Monniaux do it, it doesn't class as WP:OFFICE. If Danny does it in his normal routine of handling complaints - and in most cases, the only difference between Danny and the rest of us doing it is that he has a phone to answer, too - then *it isn't WP:OFFICE*, and the many and myriad complexities involved there don't come into it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:OFFICE
This argument is bad enough without redefining concepts on the fly...