User talk:Geogre/Version System


 * I'm curious to see whose proposal you shall bravely and unselfishly defend. I personally like the status quo just fine. Fernando Rizo T/C 02:34, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Oh, yeah, well, the status quo's perfect, absolutely, for a much smaller site. I don't want to take away the deliberation, btw, but... Oh, you'll see.  Besides, I'm just the stuntman: these aren't my ideas; I'm only here to take the fall for them. Geogre 14:33, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I read all of that just to get a cliff-hanger ending. Just when my dog was starting to scratch out his first characters in Agammemnon's script. Fernando Rizo T/C 18:50, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Hey! My dog didn't learn to communicate with the Mycenaeans in a day, so don't expect miracles!  Enough is now in place to start dismissing it as useless.  But it's going to get even more useless shortly, so stay tuned. Geogre 19:34, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

My concern
Geogre, "your" proposed system is elegant and would certainly address many of the major concerns about VfD quite capably. My problem with it is best illustrated with that most cherished element of rhetoric, the hypothetical situation. I intend, like Kurosawa's Rashōmon, to present you with two parallel yet slightly different situations. (that was just too much damn work - FR)

Okay, look. Right now, any given stranger has some control over the content of an article. If someone makes a bad-faith edit, I can almost instantaneously recognize this and revert it. If you give a stranger the ability to make a bad faith subjective judgement of an article, I can do nothing. If a kid wants to wander around through the Wikipedia voting '5' on every article or voting '1' on every stub, how do we stop that? Granted, one kid is not a problem, but a a whole Counter-strike clan of kids is. Or the GNAA. A clan's worth of kids is easy to discern on VfD: figure out who signed up when and who's got too few edits. With the new system, this is much more difficult. Fernando Rizo T/C 20:15, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I absolutely agree. That's why quorum has to be in place.  Even then, it's the weakest part, IMO.  Geogre 21:51, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Nil
Bishonen dropped a note on me suggesting that, as much as I have had favorable dealings with both you and El C, I might be able to smoothe over any rough spots that remain regarding the wp:an/i stuff.

If you feel that there is still hostility/anxiety/misunderstanding, please drop a note on my talk page. My own view is that you have an understanding of in-uniform or ex-cathedra behavior necessary for an administrator in any kind of interaction with noxious users, that you will try to distance the personal from the official when dealing with pests, so as to keep the possibilities of redress very clear. I applaud that, and, for whatever it's worth, I think it's the right thing to do. El C and Bishonen, for their parts, seem to understand this as well but to believe that the stakes are high enough with certain pests, certain speech, that all masks of official and legal action are, in essence, a betrayal of core principles that are at the heart of all open-content and open-discussion projects, that there are times, in other words, when a thing is so offensive, so dangerous, and so appalling that there is neither the need nor the benefit to being polite and impersonal. I applaud and sympathize with that, as well.

I think both are correct, and the troll's dream is to get our official voices quarrelling amongst themselves, to paralyze our enforcement with navel-gazing and personal friction. Although the troll himself was not successful directly, the fact that both yourself and El C (and Bishonen) were so close and passionately committed to your positions prevented either from explaining adequately, and therefore some really unnecessary and unhelpful animus between admins came out.

Anyway, that is my assessment from the outside, and it is as likely to be wrong as any of my other assessments. Again, if you'd like for me to expand, amplify, or butt-out, drop a note on my talk page.

Geogre