[WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs

[Andrew Gray]

2009/6/30 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:

> The trick is that an OTRS ticket is a policy compliant item tells you
> that there's an official thing happening without revealing what it is;
> the chance of it being a cabal is then low, and most sensible editors
> will back-off.

> That wasn't the problem here. The source was probably more or less
> sufficiently reliable that it shouldn't have been removed on those
> grounds. So the admins were essentially lying to the editor. IMO
> that's the real problem, and the anonymous editor was actually
> behaving quite normally and fairly reasonably.

Yeah. I think in many ways that we're seeing a case here of a fairly
reasonable judgement call being defended by quite slipshod means. (I
could see myself having done the same thing). If we had people more
confident to *say* "this is a judgement call, there are Serious
Things", and a community more willing to trust established users to
say that and not be playing tricks...

...well, we'd have a different community. But it'd be one where this
sort of situation would be more likely to play out without abuse of
"the rules" to get the intended result.

I guess, as you note above, we could probably see more use of OTRS in
a future situation; a way to note that the problem's been looked at by
someone generally-trusted, that there's something that probably
shouldn't be poked too hard, and please could people leave it there or
ask discreetly for details.

This is, on the other hand, not something that has historically proved
popular to codify. Hmm.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk