[WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Charles Matthews]

On 17 November 2012 01:34, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, no, because the Foundation has made it abundantly clear that they
> assume no responsibility whatsoever for content, or for questions like
> whether we have flagged revisions or not. All of that is fully delegated to
> the community.

In a couple of misleading senses you could argue this. The legal buck
stops with the WMF. (You clearly want to look further than the legal
position, but in the context of PR editing it has been argued that the
law is the standard, not "ethics"). What software is in operation is
handled by the developers employed by the WMF. It has indeed been
contentious whether the WMF should impose its view on the software, so
it has backed off at present.

It does seem you want to target a "blame game" at the community,
whatever bad actors do who are certainly not within the community by
any reasonable standard of compliance with norms.

<snip examples of things that can go wrong>

> But the community generally is not aware of that responsibility, or denies
> it, and certainly lacks any efficient organ to exercise it.

The first is basically untrue. The second, I think, only represents
fairly the attitude of a few "free speech extremists" on enWP (I'm not
familiar enough with other Wikipedias to comment on their
communities). I think they are fewer than they used to be.

The third is about on-site politics, which I don't think is in a very
satisfactory state, but about which I have adopted a "less is more"
line in my own comments for a few years (for reasons that are obvious,
at least to me). It is not closely connected in any case with dealing
properly with complaints, which is the problem-solving approach to
things going wrong on WP, as opposed to looking round for someone to
blame.

So can we discuss points arising in some other thread, please? All of
the above may be worth talking about, but conventionally off-topic
matters get a new subject line. Such as "If only the enWP community
got its act together we would never have to worry about PR editing
because it would be a Brave New World", perhaps.

Charles