The Great Tor Debate
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| HCM 4 | |
The Great Tor Debate started life on TOP's talk page, from there TOP threw it over to a debate page. TOP has always been one of the great IP banners of RW and, as such, was happy to find minds of similar color. Regular users may remember his attempts to individually ban all TOR IPs from the wiki.
[edit] On and off
User Armondikov was, sort of, in favor of the idea and user π offered to help out and advised on the scale of the problem. Upon hearing the numbers, TOP had no doubts: There are that few? Let 'er rip. quoth the new wiki leader. (Later comments by TOP seem to suggest that he may have been a little "tired and emotional" at the time.)
In usual RW fashion, others had some doubts. PitchBlackMind expressed his concern, and Pi relented. Nevertheless more confusion and opinion followed and the blocking was back on again.
Then Bob M chimed in, pointing out that a debate page was not the place to decide such changes and Pi once again had to remove his blocks. Now π moved the debate to community standards and a message was put on the intercom for all interested parties, unfortunately he neglected to include a link back to the original debate and none of the subsequent contributors thought to add one either. What followed was a pretty standard and mild-mannered RW debate about the issues which gave a clear RW "open editing" result.
[edit] A Human reaction
Then Human came in from the bar.
It's not clear what really hacked him off about this process. He objected to the very existence of the debate. He strenuously objected to π's actions. He complained bitterly about the fact that the two pages were not linked. Then he complained about it again. He suggested that Pi was trying to whitewash his actions by not making the link. He seemed to suggest that no bot should have sysop powers. He shouted and yelled a bit more so that he got a couple of Step Away from the Keyboard suggestions.
Anyway, π wasn't the only one involved and did not act unilaterally but at the suggestion of TOP. And what happened to TOP? Why did he not come out to support π's actions?
[edit] More top action
Of course that was not the only unilateral decision that TOP and Armondikov came up with that night - and this is why we wonder about TOP's chemical state at the time. They also decided to get rid of unnecessary and redundant CP references in mainspace, but as (almost) nobody noticed that they slipped that one in, it's OK.
