On 10/10/06, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Danny did not make this decision in a vacuum. There were a series of emails over the course of six months leading up to this; there was also an IRC discussion lasting at least half an hour in which Danny discussed the details of those emails.
None of these were on the wiki, however, making those of us that were not privy or aware of such discussions to view these as being in a vacuum.
AD-VER-TISE-MENT. Spam. Deletable under the new speedy deletion criteria for spam which Brad had made not long earlier.
Yes, an "advertisement" in their mind that had survived an AfD through the community, a group of editors who believed that the article merited inclusion. Thus, the spam should have been edited, period, not deleted as it was.
This is the part people seem to be failing to grasp here from my end. This wasn't some completely unknown product that no one ever saw, edited, or AfD'd. It would be entirely uncontroversial and no one would care in the least if it were. This was an article that had community approval, and should have never gotten to this point. Danny, who was working as just another administrator in this case, decided that the consensus (you know, the way we do things) didn't matter, and just acted. Not a good thing.
It's bad enough we rushed into a bad spam CSD policy. It's worse when we try to justify obviously poor decisions based around it.
-Jeff
-- If you can read this, I'm not at home.
Surely this is just another symptom of the fact that the "majority view" or consensus of the community can sometimes be wrong? Nevermind the fact that it is only a handful of editors (relative to the whole editing community) who are party to any given issue. OK - perhaps you disagree in this instance - but can you really not imagine a similar situation where one or two people are in the right, and most people involved are flat out wrong?
I am firmly of the belief that there are fundemental flaws with Wikipedia's modus operandi. The whole "consensus approach" to things like AFD are entirely capable of producing undesirable results. They'll continue to do so too. We will continue to have rubbish of all varieties kept, and ill-written, obscure, disliked, inaccurate (not necessarily incorrect) and unfortunate content deleted. And that's just the stuff that reaches AFD!
Sorry for being harsh - but I'd really like to see some attempt to deal with these fundamental problems that Wikipedia has!
Zoney