[WikiEN-l] [[Views of Lyndon LaRouche]] indefinitely full protected

[Marc Riddell]

> On 10/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On 10/21/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It's not a routine protection; it's a longstanding, active, serious
>> abuse
>>> case.
>> 
>> Even so, this is not what we've ever done! What this is is an
>> effective elevation of admins into a specially protected
>> "super"-editor class that have full powers to decide and control what
>> goes in an article. That is NOT what an admin is supposed to do,
>> article contents have always been decided by community consensus. It
>> is a foundational issue, right up there with Free Content and NPOV.
>> 
>> This is counter to what wikipedia is. We're not Citizendium.
>> 
>> --Oskar
> 
> on 10/20/07 6:58 PM, George Herbert at george.herbert at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> If this has to become a regular occurrence then we will clearly have lost a
> core battle somewhere.  I do  not disagree with that point.
> 
> This is an *extremely* unusual case.  There are very few organized and
> persistent campaigns by fringe groups to significantly attack knowledge on
> Wikipedia; this is one of them.  They are not editing to improve the state
> of knowledge in the world or represented on Wikipedia.  They're using it as
> a venue to fight their battles.
> 
> Denying them this venue to fight in is orthogonal to our goal to be a
> reference source, open to contributions.  Letting them fight here is
> contrary to our goals.  Unfortunately, we need to take this article (and
> potentially others on the topic) "out of play" and end their use in the
> fight.
> 
> Groups and their individual members always will want to slant Wikipedia;
> we're all human.  We have lots of policy and precedent to deal with that.
> But extended, organized campaigns are another thing entirely.
> 
George, this does, however, look and feel like a very slippery slope. Is
there not another way to deal with this without what seems to be an
abandonment of a very basic principle of the Project? By taking this course
of action you are allowing them to control us.

Marc Riddell