On 30/06/2009, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > What are policies for? We tend not to ask this often enough. > > I say that policies are generally there to create reasonable > expectations, of editors contributing to Wikipedia, under what you could > call "normal circumstances". We have IAR because not all circumstances > are normal, and application of policy can lead to the "wrong" answer.
The problem is that there are always cabals as well as single people that simply believe strange things. So if somebody (anybody, but particularly an admin) does something strange, are they a member of a cabal or is there something happening they can't tell you? If they're a member of a cabal or simply believe something strange then they need to be resisted, but if there is something they can't tell you then that's much more likely to be OK. 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. > WP:BLP has as nutshell "Biographical material must be written with the > greatest care and attention to verifiability, neutrality and avoiding > original research", which I agree with; together with stuff about > ethical and legal responsibility (which I find somewhat surprising). > Anyway, the "greatest attention" to verifiability means that high > standards such as more than one source can be applied, even if news > agencies were always reliable sources (which is very debatable, I > think). "Be very firm about the use of high quality references", it > says. That's the letter. 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. > Charles -- -Ian Woollard "All the world's a stage... but you'll grow out of it eventually." _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l