[WikiEN-l] Fleshlight

[George Herbert]

On 10/9/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 18:32:19 -0400, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>
> wrote:
>
> >> 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).
>
> >This is one of the finest paragraphs in this entire thread.
>
> Damn right.  On DRV this is turning into a witch-hunt, with the
> spammers being given infinitely more consideration than Danny.  That
> sucks badly.
>
> Guy (JzG)

The spammers are due no consideration.  I am still wondering why they
got the special consideration in the first place, which led to this
happening at all, as opposed to someone tagging it with cleanup or
something.

The issue with Danny is... well, ok.  Nothing personal, but you're the
rouge du jour, Danny.

A lot of admins are not taking due account for the potential that
their actions can be as harmful to the project overall as a random
spammer, vandal, or troll.  Or in some cases, worse.

As I have said before: I love WP:BOLD, but as with swinging ones arms
around in public, your right to swing ends slightly short of the
person next to yours' chin.  If you WP:BOLD something and a vandal or
spammer cries out in agony, you probably did the right thing.  If you
WP:BOLD and a bunch of experienced editors and admins scream, you
likely overstepped.

I see a lot of people complaining about loss of community.  Well, that
swings both ways.  If you stubbornly insist that an off the cuff bold
action was right, in the face of a lot of pushback, you're not giving
the community its due.

Any bold action which results in flames across multiple WP admin
pages, contentious DRV, and several mailing lists WAS A MISTAKE.  It
was too controversial to be safe to do boldly.  It's fine if someone
didn't know that it would be controversial beforehand.  But everyone,
particularly anyone who may appear to be part of "the administration"
(office, arbcom, burecrats, senior admins, etc), needs to be very
sensitive to this.  If you stubbornly defend it rather than pull back
and run it through the consensus, then you've just become the source
of aggrivation of the problem.

More harm has been done to community by stubborn defenses of
unexpectedly contentious bold actions over the last year than any
other single thing.  Vandals have damaged articles more, but they are
generally ineffective at riling up the community (with a few
exceptions).


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com