Wikipedia:Office actions/Originalia

Jimbo's clarification [1]

The core idea is that the process SHOULD work like this:

1. A hysterical phone call comes in to the office. There might or might not be legal threats. The hysteria might or might not be justified. But someone is sad, and Wikipedia is not here to make people sad. So we want to respond in a helpful and loving way.

2. The article is stubbed and tagged as WP:OFFICE. This is a message to good editors: "Please help us. This article is making someone unhappy. We want to make sure that it is a thoughtful, fair, neutral article. We need GOOD editors to pay attention to it, and help us make it good."

I would recommend protection or semi-protection at this point, but with the idea that even if protected admins are (as compared to normal protection) actually encouraged to come help with the article.

3. After some reasonable period of time, hopefully 24 hours, but perhaps as long as a week, the article has become a shining beauty. The subject of the biography (and really, these are most often biographies) is either made happy (because a horrible error was corrected, a troll was vanquished, or whatever) or made at least satisfied (the story of the negative thing he or she did once is now placed in appropriate context, properly cited, including citations to his or her own response and defense).

4. Joy.

Mailing list messages

• I am Danny Danny says:
  • I thought I would introduce myself for those who do not know me, and tell you a little bit about what I do. My name is Danny Wool [...] my job is the first level of triage. In most cases, I will call or email our attorney and provide him with as much information as I can, including name, phone number, contact info, etc. He then responds accordingly, sometimes with instructions for me as to what should happen next.
• Phone calls Danny says:
  • I spend at least one-third of my time just answering the calls. It is very time consuming, and they come in at all hours of the day, interrupting what I am otherwise doing (donor management, for instance). I CANNOT spend another one-third or more of my time explaining every phone call to the community.
• Apology Jimbo Wales says:
  1. This policy merely extends longstanding practice, previously not questioned, because I did it myself.
  2. Nothing about this policy changes anything about our NPOV policies for any article in Wikipedia. WP:OFFICE in no way implies that some articles or some people are given any special treatment in the handling of their biography.
  3. WP:OFFICE is intended to be used only temporarily as a courtesy in certain highly delimited circumstances. In some cases, this will be cases involving a threat of legal action, but in other cases it may be simply as a courtesy while we sort something out.
  4. In all cases, we will communicate the maximum possible information in the shortest possible time period, subject to legal constraints and also time constraints.
  5. Danny has, in my own opinion, formed in long experience, excellent judgment.
  6. In some cases so far, WP:OFFICE was used for a longer period than I would have liked, due to various circumstances. I'm sorry about that. However, I remind everyone that Assume Good Faith is absolutely important to our community.
• Libel chill Jimbo Wales says:
  1. WP:OFFICE is always temporary, an emergency action, an action of goodwill, thus far used exclusively (or almost exclusively) for biographies of living persons. The issue is NOT "a tradeoff between NPOV and risk of being sued".
  2. Let me repeat that, the issue is NOT "a tradeoff between NPOV and risk of being sued". The issue is responding quickly and effectively to cases where we have a very strong indication from someone that an article is egregiously in violation of NPOV.
  3. If the topic is Carbon Tetrachloride and we receive a strong complaint that the article is biased, then {{sofixit}} can be a fine response. If the topic is a real live human being about whom someone has written something egregiously false or mean spirited, and the person calls up in hysterics, then the right answer is: stub and rebuild with strong verification. The right answer is: temporary protection of a safe version while good editors take the time to figure out what the heck is going on.
  4. It is very deeply confused to view WP:OFFICE as some kind of rollback of the neutrality policy. It is a means of working towards neutrality. It is the morally right thing to do when we are faced with a serious issue.
  5. Since WP:OFFICE is done publicly and under intense scrutiny from the community and the external world, I hardly see any need for a special narrow committee to be specifically tasked with overseeing it.
  6. What should people do when they see a WP:OFFICE action? Treat it as a call for attention from the absolute best within ourselves, the absolute best within our community. Here we have an article which has gone horribly wrong in some way, and sometimes it can be a mystery as to what exactly the problem is. Why is someone upset? Which claim in the article is false or overstated or biased or hostile? I think dozens of people should swoop in and start working really hard on a temp version (usually protected or semi-protected, depending on the exact nature of the situation), with extreme hardcore attention paid to sourcing, to neutral phrasing, etc.
  7. In this way, WP:OFFICE articles can become models of good behavior by Wikipedia, can show the world how seriously we take our mission, our responsibility.