[Foundation-l] Jimbo Wales acting outside his remit

Kim Bruning kim at bruning.xs4all.nl
Sat May 8 14:42:10 UTC 2010


On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 01:47:52PM +0100, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> On 5/8/10 12:12 PM, Adam Cuerden wrote:
> > and has made a statement that he refuses to discuss his deletions until
> > after he has finished deleting them all, which would only compound the
> > problem.
> 
> To the contrary, I have been very active in discussions both on the 
> wiki, in email, and in irc.  Pretending that I'm not a reasonable person 
> open to discussion and debate is not going to be very persuasive to 
> anyone who knows me. :-)

This does not compute: I actually back-checked that with the commons
community, with exact times and dates. You failed to take into account
specific key concerns (to wit: in-use images), _after_ you were informed of them. 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Sexual_content#Jimbo_the_vandal

specifically:
"
Did these actions happen before, or after I talked with [Jimbo Wales] on irc today?
(this was at 12:50) --Kim Bruning (talk) 19:38, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

    After kim, way after. TheDJ (talk) 19:44, 7 May 2010 (UTC) 
"

Before 12:50, I could have said you "pulled an Ed Poor" [1]. After 12:50, I
would say that yes, you were demonstrably unreasonable.

I do understand how high profile actions can go wrong in the heat of the
moment. I've made mistakes too in the past (and have enemies to show for
it). One of the things one needs to do to turn mistakes into lessons is to
listen carefully to key concerns, once they are raised. 

As long as one demonstrably learns from mistakes, community support is
(mostly) assured, and one can carry on to achieve ones objectives. Failure
to learn is potentially fatal to the project at hand, if not one's
wiki-career. 

The correct course of action -once you were informed- would have been to
either leave in-use images alone for a 2nd pass, or mark them with a
PROD(like) tag.

Sj is currently doing damage control on Commons, bless him! :-)

sincerely,
	Kim Bruning

[1] I have often defended Ed Poors actions, and I admired the way he dealt
with mistakes. Of course, after a while he got a little too cocky, and
thought he could sweet-talk his way out of *anything* (oops), but other than
that, he's a good model to learn from. For those of us who don't know who Ed
Poor is/ was:  This is the man who ALMOST got away with deleting "Votes For
Deletion" on a whim one day. 

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