User talk:Josiah Rowe

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I like to keep conversations together. If you leave me a note here, I'll usually respond here. If I've started a conversation on your talk page, I'll usually check your talk page for a reply. (There may be exceptions, but that's the general pattern.) If a conversation jumps between pages, I'll often copy it over so that the whole thing appears on one page.

FP post

Hi! Did you not read through my post right before yours at Thread:206566? I was trying to stress that we cannot allow self-sourcing and we have no way of knowing for sure that these posters are who they claim to be, and you've undone that by giving them validity (to quote your words: "the FP authors in this thread"). I (and the few other active admins) have had to deal with a lot of activity lately regarding our distinction between valid and invalid, and it doesn't help at all to have an admin (especially one who hasn't edited in a long time and might not be familiar with more recent policy decisions) come in and completely undermine our efforts. I suggest you read the policy and forum thread I cited since they are apparently new for you. Thanks. Shambala108 ☎ 03:28, December 21, 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, no, I did not see your post before mine. I started a reply a while back, and was interrupted before I finished; you must have posted while I was dealing with my sleepless daughter.

I can understand the objections to self-sourcing, but I can also personally verify that the authors in question are who they say they are. At least, they are posting on Stuart Douglas' Facebook page that they have commented in that thread.

Anyway, not intending to undermine anything. I just thought that the views of the authors and publishers were relevant to the discussion. —Josiah Rowe ☎ 03:50, December 21, 2016 (UTC)

Fwiffhader

Hey :) Happy new year to you as well :)

I'm of course not happy to block anyone. I genuinely hate it, and haven't done it in over two years. As I think you'll remember, the general amnesty and retirement of every single block we did back in 2013 was one of the best things I think the wiki ever did.

That said, blocking is of course sometimes necessary, particularly when basic civility is under attack. And this specific block was arrived at as a part of a discussion amongst myself and other admin. It wasn't a unilateral decision at all; I was sorta just the one who got tapped to write it up. It takes into consideration the fact that other infractions of the policy were not met with any punitive measures, and that he was effectively put on probation already by Shambala108's comments on both his user talk page and within forum discussions. As the block notice makes clear, there's not just one violation of T:ATTACKS here, but several.

Moreover, the fact that three separate users of this wiki called his allusion to fascism "hate speech" compelled action where none had previously been strongly indicated. Look back on his user talk page, and you will find one user particularly mortified by the comparison. Honestly, this comment was there very much earlier in the year, and my initial reaction was to just let it slide. But if ordinary users are clearly morally offended by it, then isn't it the responsibility of admin to stand up for them? I mean, don't we have a duty of care to make sure users won't have to put up with this sort of mean-spiritedness?

We'll look at it some more over the coming days and weeks, but when you count up the number of infractions and imagine a situation where each one had been separately and progressively punished, you get to a year pretty quickly. It doesn't feel like an outrageous length. But I'm not saying we can't still talk about this, obviously. So please continue to leave messages if you have more say. :)
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  07:05: Mon 02 Jan 2017