[WikiEN-l] Just what *is* Jimbo's role anyway? - "nofollow" decision

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:15:54 -0400, Jeff Raymond
<jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:

>> Rushed?  People had been asking for G11 for as long as I can remember.
>> It was going to happen sooner or later anyway, and a firm steer from
>> Foundation that spam, abuse of Wikipedia resources for self-promotion,
>> is an abuse and should be stamped on, is hardly a controversial idea.

>I'm referring more to the post-Patrick handling more than the typical 
>cries for expansions of various criteria for speedy deletion.

Very few cries these days, the majority of obvious and unequivocal
crap can simply be deleted.  And make no mistake, almost all of it
*is* crap.  I review my deletion logs quite frequently, the proportion
of articles I delete and which subsequently come back in an
encyclopaedic form is tiny - in the tens, out of some thousands of
deletions.

>> You have a strange view of things.  The entire project is for the
>> benefit of people outside the foundation, mainly people like you and
>> me and my kids.

>I don't think so.  Look at how we handled Kohs and the Microsoft issue 
>and our COI guideline/policy - it's not meant to be flamebait, Kat, 
>thank you very much, but it's sometimes realy sad how we handle things 
>that may actually beenfit us as well as outside people financially.

Yup, we banned Kohs.  Good call.  And we told Microsoft not to pay
people to edit.  Good call.  And the world didn't end.  Kohs thinks
we're evil, of course, but Kohs also thinks Wikipedia is bound to fail
as a business directory because it does not allow subjects editorial
control.  If Wikipedia was or aspired to be a business directory he
might have a point, but that is not what we are and not what we want
to be.  Sure, there are people who utterly misunderstand the purpose
of the project, and then lambast us for not being what they think we
should be. Nobody is forcing them to keep coming back.  Moths to a
flame, I guess, and every now and then one of them gets burned.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG