On 11 September 2012 16:14, Ken Arromdee <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 11 Sep 2012, Charles Matthews wrote: > >> The Roth situation was WP between a rock (celeb culture with its ohmigod >> you dissed X) and a hard place (academic credibility requires that, yes, >> you do require verifiable additions and don't accept argument from >> authority). It would tend to illustrate that celeb power can potentially >> be >> deployed against serious discourse. Countervailing "admin power" is always >> a questionable analysis. >> > > If someone who could reasonably be seen as speaking for Wikipedia told him > that Wikipedia needed secondary sources for his claim, they are wrong, and > Wikipedia failed. >
That is what I have described before as the point of failure, if the inference is correct. There has been plenty of discussion on the premise that there was a failure of courtesy, which I don't see. > > It completely misses the point to explain how Wikipedia's actual policies > are > reasonable. The policy that Roth was told about is not reasonable; if it > doesn't match Wikipedia's actual policy, he shouldn't be expected to figure > that out. > > It has nothing to do with celebrity power, except that when celebrities run > into bad admins, people learn about it. Without the whole mail being made public, I don't see how we can conclude "bad". Selective quotation is what we have in the New Yorker letter, together with some over-interpretation. Which is rhetoric. But the bulk of Roth's letter is much more interesting than that rather scanty intro. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
