On 10/20/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/21/07, George Herbert george.herbert@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@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