[WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/21/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > What the hell is going on here? Some of the sentences Jimbo removed:
> > "In 2002 the owners of the Mega Society, a high IQ society, filed suit
> > against Langan and his wife, Gina LoSasso, for unauthorized use of the
> > society's trademarks and trade names.[29][30][31]"
> >
> > This is original research?
>
> Yes.  To my knowledge, this has never been written up in any newspaper,
> magazine, or book.  It was discovered by reading websites that I think
> we would all agree are not themselves reliable sources and by
> referencing official court documents.  The case, what happened in it,
> the outcome, are all matters of interpretation involving original
> research, and indeed the question of whether or not this is important
> enough to include (raising questions of undue weight) is in this case
> original research.

I objected to the removal of two pieces of information:
1) About the history of the organisation, as claimed by the
organisation itself. You don't offer any explanation for removing
this.
2) The fact of the lawsuit taking place. I can see how the outcome
could be subject to interpretation, but what's to interpret about
"Party A sued Party B?"

Now, obviously this whole matter arose out of some kind of complaint,
so we're working backwards. Had we not known that there would be a
complaint, would we really have removed these statements? It's easy to
come along afterwards and say "that's OR! we must remove it!" But if
we went through Wikipedia removing every statement of that kind, there
wouldn't be all that much.

This is my objection to what I called Jimbo's "drive by" style:
someone calls his attention to a problem, and he says "this should
never have been allowed". But the rest of us don't have this power of
hindsight: we have to make decisions in advance of any complaint
directed against the Foundation. And the policies, including WP:OR,
just aren't that helpful.
 So the vast majority of the time we err on the side of
informativeness: it's informative to say "X was a splinter group that
broke off from Y, then Y's founder sued X's founder."[1]

[1] I've probably got this all wrong. Pity it's not written up
somewhere in a freely available encyclopaedia.

>I made no policy declarations.  I responded to an ACTIVE WP:BLP
complaint by taking an action perfectly within policy

Policy that only serves to hit us over the head rather than guide us
is not good policy. WP:OR is great for explaining what we did wrong.
But it doesn't help us write a good encyclopaedia.

Steve