[WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

[George Herbert]

On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
> > 2008/12/28 Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net>:
> >
> >> Yeah, I'm still bitter about spoiler warnings, but perhaps they should
> be a
> >> lesson.  Wikipedia is a game of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic .
> >>
> > Yes, because them being (a) clearly stupid in too many cases (b)
> > clearly original research to declare as spoiler (c) having six
> > different venues to tell you you're wrong and to go away must be
> > because of clever politics on the part of those you disagree with, not
> > because you're actually wrong or anything.
> >
>
> That was actually one of those rare instances where a mailing list
> campaign worked.  Too bad that one otherwise sane Wikipedian has been
> infected by chronic wiki-tetanus over this.
>

Please don't get judgemental with Ken on this.

He's correct - a few people, without raising a proper consensus, bullied
this through.

I also disagree with the new standard - Spoiler warnings have been a normal
part of most internet plot discussions for 20+ years.

The decision to use them was a reasonable default.  A decision not to use
them, supported by proper consensus, would have been fine.  Several people
here on the list decided that they had a minimum critical mass to be BOLD
rather than submitting it to a proper consensus discussion, and got away
with it.

If I were a prick, or had cared more about it, I could have shot the BOLD
move down at the time.  What was being done was perfectly legitimately bulk
undoable under standing policy consensus, and there were a few more lurkers
willing to participate in undoing it if someone "known" started it off, as
opposed to just Ken tilting at windmills.

I decided not to because:
A) I judged that it would be more disruptive to the community than the issue
was fundamentally worth, and
B) I judged that there was probably at least a 40% chance that consensus
would develop to support the move eventually.
C) A few well known Wikipedians getting away with a minor instance of
bullying was probably not that serious a problem.

Of these, I have only come to change my mind on C - I think that the
community was lessened by letting it happen, because it emboldened a bunch
of people who really *don't* share the ultimate end goals we do of making an
encyclopedia to go fuck with us using the same logic.  In retrospect, I
would probably not have fought the auto-revert campaign approach, but I
should have thrown a fit about this on policy boards and hauled a bunch of
you up to Arbcom for abuse of process.

It's water under the bridge now, but Ken's ongoing griping is the least
symptom of the ongoing ripples this event had in our community.  That few of
you noticed how it emboldened the bad apples is extremely unfortunate and
shortsighted.

You weren't evil, but what you did was, and the truly evil people noticed.
My trying to walk the tightrope ended up helping enable evildoers on
Wikipedia, and that still bothers the hell out of me.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com