They were probably thinking it would be awesome to deploy a swarm of small fighter planes by dropping them from a bomber. In which they were absolutely right, it hardly gets any more awesome than that. Unfortunately, it also doesn't get much more impractical than that, which was apparently casually brushed aside to satisfy the rule of cool. Unfortunately, reason set in before it was taken in production.
I thought their mission was building an online encyclopedia. (Or as the Wikimedia Foundation puts it more generally, "... to bring free educational content to the world."
Free in that statement is about free as in freedom, not free as in beer
I didn't know that the fire mentioned above was controversial, it didn't seem so from the original post. If it was, it was phrased rather misleading imo. But this experiment sounds fun too. Pick a clearly slanted article, and I'll make the anonymous edit.
"show me every page in wikitext mode" is a setting that virtually nobody would want though. I know I wouldn't want that. If that seriously would be your preference, you might be the only one. Always on visual editor (that doesn't suck and loads fast). Now that would be awsome.
You would see an unholy mess of wikitext rather than a parsed article. It's slowly getting there though. There is a visual editor - though it's far from good yet, and couldn't handle the server load of being always on. For now, you're still stuck pressing edit.
Nope. They have started a slow burn of all articles not up to their dogmatic community standards. Witness the thousands of pages of pagan-related material that a couple editors took upon themselves to remove, and then lock the discussion pages so nobody could comment on it while doing so.
Wow, really? It is incredibly bad for a discussion page to be locked. Could you give a couple of examples? Heck, even one example would be great. If this is realy true, it should be fixed immediately.
Sometimes that does happen too fast - but most what is fast-deleted is in fact junk. What were the articles about? Can you remember the titles, or failing that, your Wikipedia user name? I can restore them for you if you want (and they aren't junk, obviously)
wikipedia indicates that there were 5.9 million viewers in the U.S. alone, vs 2.93 million for the season opening episode. I think one can easily call this a massive success. The piracy issues seems minor in comparison.
I'm not much of a tv watcher myself, but the show I do tend to watch, Dr. Who, is free to air where I live. Without commercials too. I don't think I've ever watched it on live tv, I always pirate it purely for convenience. As long as the most convenient thing is pirating, I will continue doing so.
For music on the other hand, the most convenient thing is generally spotify, so I pay the reasonable price for a subscription. The things not on spotify I pirate.
Afaik Netflix is not yet available here in the Netherlands (it wasn't the last time I checked, about a year back), but if it were and there was a subscription that fit my consumer pattern, I wouldn't mind paying something for it either.
Digital on demand media is getting there. Its just a matter of time. The traditional media will either adapt to the demands of a new generation of consumers, or die out and be replaced by those who do understand how to deliver what I want.
If someone can't understand "a=F/m" (or "acceleration=force/mass"), do you really think they have any idea what "acceleration is inversely proportional to mass" means?
Yes. But that's not really to the point. The point is, that equations break the flow of prose, and don't work well in explaining things, other than in a purely mathematical context. If you are not speaking about mathematics (and nobody other than mathematicians really do, and the OP is rather math related, but is not about the math of the uncertainty principle but its applications) it's best to keep equations out of it. This is obviously a rule of thumb and there are bound to be exceptions where using an equation is actually beneficial to the global understanding of the issue, but these cases are rare, and far in between. For the OP for example, I agree that not using equations was probably the right choice, though I would have made different editorial choices in the prose, and possibly using one equation (to wit, \sigma_{x}\sigma_{p} \geq \frac{\hbar}{2} ) could maybe have been defensible, but still a choice I would have disagreed with.
I would argue that very few to no popular articles need the exact formula for black body specific intensity. But if they do, the formulaic form is clearly superior. It's likelier that the article would focus on a specific aspect off blackbody radiation. To wit, I would expect the majority to talk about the ultraviolet catastrophe, and I wouldn't explain it in terms of equations at all, neither in symbolic nor in written out form.
Yes, they do a poor job in explaining things to people who don't know what the terms in the equation mean; raw math often says little if anything, by itself, about the real world, as you have to connect the mathematical items to items in the real world.
But, BTW:
I'd much rather read an article containing "because acceleration is inversely proportional to mass" than one containing "because F=ma"
...I'd rather read an article containing "because, for the same amount of force applied, acceleration is inversely proportional to mass"; my mass is much less than that of a Porsche 911, but I can't even get to 100 km/h on foot or on a bicycle, much less do so as fast as a 911 can. Given equal driving skill and the same driving techniques, however, I could probably get to 100 km/h in a 911 slightly faster than somebody weighing 100kg could in the same 911.
depending on the context that could be a good idea, though an example doesn't immediately come to mind. Completeness may be sacrificed for clarity if there is sufficient context. my above example is obviously a snippet without context, and as such is quite incorrect on it's own, but would also never occur in practice on its own. All context that I can imagine would make it sufficiently clear, especially since nobody would be thinking that acceleration would be a function of mass alone. It's almost like writing articles is a profession that requires more than stringing words together that are correct.
Without math, it's impossible to convey what you're trying to convey. The press is way too dumbed down already, and many times I've read science stories that are just plain misleading as they try to simplify the message.
Putting equations into news stories means that some people won't understand them, but most importantly it will encourage some of those people to investigate further, and learn how to read equations. If there's no math in the popular press in the first place, then there's no incentive for people to improve themselves.
no equations doesn't mean no math. Equations generally do a pretty poor job in explaining things. I'd much rather read an article containing "because acceleration is inversely proportional to mass" than one containing "because F=ma"
I don't know about that. If wikipedia had kept on growing it could have something like 200m articles and hundreds of thousands of editors. I'd love to be able to get a good or even so-so quality article on every piece of networking equipment. Get a good or even so-so quality article on every command in every programming language. Get a good or even so-so quality article on every major building in the world. How are the almost 200m articles better for me?
It was a direct result on the ~2006-2010 "lolwikipedia so unreliable" what was getting heard more and more (notice how you rarely hear this anymore), for better and for worse.
You can't.
We might. Vast changes will be needed though, and in a manner that is carried by the current community (or else everyone will leave, and the current content will also start to degrade rapidly. Say what you want about the current community, but they are excellent at policing stuff). The idea for a separate draft namespace has been floating around. I don't really mind the idea of making the main mainspace less Wiki, wiki isn't the right model for mature articles anyway. Getting back a 'real' wiki with all its pros and cons where Wikipedia (which will then be a 'fake' wiki; it will run wiki software, but not a wiki philosopy) can cherry pick from isn't so bad. Maybe this could even be its own project. I'm not sure yet. As long as that wiki/namespace is not scared of being called unreliable and won't think they have to respond to that they'll be fine. Being unreliable is fine, as long as you're clear about it, name the pros and cons, and people know where they stand when using the content. Spam might still be a problem. I'm not sure how big of a problem. As long as you're relatively invisible, spammers don't take interest.
Ask anyone who was editing then. The stuff that happened in 2006 / 7 never would be allowed today. I was constantly able to get good quality articles from knowledgeable insiders and later get them properly referenced. Today that's simply not allowed.
This is the important part. I think the Wikimodel is an amazing model at creating content to solidly mediocre to pretty decent levels. To a very good level, not so much. Maintaining a very good level, even much less so. When we started getting more articles across that line (and I'm not fooling myself thinking that a significant fraction is, but a significant absolute number certainly is), the Wikimodel started breaking down, and the community slowly moved away from it. Maybe it will please you to know the jubilant spirit of ~2008-2010 where we felt we were invincible is gone, and many acknowledge we do indeed have a problem with our community. The threshold for joining the community has almost certainly risen. We're working on it though, and to attempt to steer back to the original topic, making at least one hindrance easier to overcome - the arcane editing interface.
With the increased readership and social relevance of Wikipedia, the community started to care more about the overall quality of the project. A bad article was more and more seen as a problem, rather than as a start for something great. It was pretty much the price of success; one could even argue that as much earlier Wikipedia was better for its community, so much better is it now for its readers. How we can get the energy and spunk of the earlier years back, while maintaining the relevance and overall higher quality of the more recent years is the great challenge Wikipedia currently faces.
At the same time, while I agree there is a lot of bad, the situation isn't quite as grim as you make it out to be. I think that your picture of Wikipedia of 2006-2007 is a little too rosy too. Maybe the ugly was already there, or was at least there in part, but you just hadn't really run in to it. I created my account in 2005 and ran for admin in 2008, so I was certainly around during those years. When I look over the history of the Bristol Palin article, I see a prod, which was removed by the very next editor (not you), and an AfD which, well, saying one had to fight ones way to keep it is not really the reality of that discussion.
That would have helped, but I would have still walked away upset that basically an admin can try to abuse the system without any sort of consequence. I think a more appropriate response would have been, "here's a pretty baseless accusation of sockpuppetry; let's look into this some more."
On the other hand, when an editor has genuine concerns someone might be abusing the system by sockpuppeting, even is misguided, we shouldn't be discouraging them of expressing them, and having someone take a look at that. There should be no consequence on being mistaken, and acting upon it. There is a lot of funny business going on. A problem is that the request for a check in itself feels like an accusation. An apology from the admin in question, or the denying SPI clerk might have been ice though. I'm going to give this some thought, and see if I can come up with something reasonable.
3+ years ago if a person was going to be banned there was either an extensive community process (very rare) or an arbcom ruling. They got due process. Today admins apply indef bans rather freely. I don't mind arbcom doing bans they showed discretion and insured due process, I do mind indef blocks to well established editors under almost any circumstances.
Similarly admins sent stuff to moderation in 2007 they didn't ban people for "edit warring". If an admin was going to get involved in an article they had a responsibility to ensure the process was followed. The number of articles that was locked was like 20-100 not thousands.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'send stuff to moderation'. Also I see no significant difference between ANI in 2007 and ANI now. Also, show me the most recent indef block for edit warring that wasn't repealed on request, and you think shouldn't have happened. I have no metrics for number of protected articles, and sadly, this isn't easily queryable for historical data, but if you do, that would be an interesting metric. Did you get that somewhere, or is that from memory?
In 2007 the assumption was all content was good and the burden was to prove otherwise.
2006 begs to differ Quick anecdotical evidence from AfD logs (looking back to 2004) doesn't show what you are saying.
Are you using a page that indicates the growth in number of articles is slowing down as an argument against that the readership is still growing? That doesn't make sense.
. Say, I find myself in the same theoretical situation: I think that some accounts are related and vote-stacking. What should I do that can both relief my concerns and not scare away the new editor(s) in case I'm wrong? After being a Wikipedian for quite a long time, it becomes increasingly difficult to properly understand the environment for new users.
I've been around a while. The way this was done was genuine consensus. A well regarded established editor who disagreed was not disciplined and there was not a majority rules coalition. The downside was that fringe material got into articles, though usually marked as fringe. The upside was that articles reflected the wikipedia community. Today articles more closely represent the academic / business / mainstream context and that's accomplished by threatening editors.
so... what should I do that can both relief my concerns and not scare away the new editor(s) in case I'm wrong?
The visual editor will help some as it lowers the barrier for small edits. Small edits can make a huge difference to articles so that's a good thing.
agreed
You do have authority figures.
who?
the victory of deletionists 5 years ago
it's slowly turning around, fortunately. Check AfD and compare to say 3 years back.
the change of admin from being a shop keeping function to a privileged clique
I still generally find it mop-up-on-isle-5
summary bans instead of arbitration committee process
are you pleading for authority figures now? While ArbCom was given the ability to ban users in case the community can't figure out whether or not to ban, that responsibility lies primarily with the community, not with ArbCom. Letting ArbCom decide on all possible bans is exactly the power that we don't want to give it, but want to retain with the community
etc... has turned Wikipedia into a thoroughly unpleasant community.
No argument from me that we are not going in the right direction, behaviourally. That's basically what I am saying above.
And there is no question there is a hierarchy in place and cruel indifferent one at that. Wikipedia was growing incredibly 2004-8. It aimed to change the world and it was. 2008-2013 it is a pretty cool website.
Wikipedia has more readers than ever. An optimist could say it aimed to change the world and it has. But there is a long way to go. Broader inclusion criteria and a better editing climate is certainly part of that.
Would it had helped if the almost legalese of "Lack of evidence has led this case to languish; closing this case without prejudice against the opening of a new one if further evidence should present." would have been phrases differently, possibly something along the lines as "there is insufficient evidence to justify opening checkuser records for this case. A new request can be made, but more solid evidence have to be presented to make it plausible these accounts are connected"? This is almost certainly also how the requesting admin had read it.
This has nothing to do with their position as admin by the way, a non-admin could have done exactly the same, with pretty much the same traction (a very very new user, say, less than 100 edits might be looked at with a little more reserve, even if that is against policy, but a editor with some 1000 edits would have been treated the same as an admin), but the knowledge of the system certainly is an issue.
As far as addressing behavioural issues, we have hardly anything in place, which is an acknowledged problem all round, from admins who get too little feedback on what they are doing wrong, to fringe nutcases who know their way around, but are still fringe nutcases and push all sorts of nonsense. We're unsure how to address the problem, as our system is supposed to be self regulating, but really isn't. What should happen, is that we should stop being scared of telling others in good standing when they make mistakes, without it becoming a lynch mob. That's easier said than done though, and we have unintentionally harbored a situation where criticism on an action is easily interpreted as an attack to a person. That's a culture that is not easily broken.
we both felt a bit odd as there wasn't a need to. It's a statue and a statue is free game
Federal claims court disagrees, it's in the freedom of panorama link you replied to. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise when it has just been pointed out to you.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my FAVE failures: McDonnell XF-85 Goblin
What WERE they thinking?
They were probably thinking it would be awesome to deploy a swarm of small fighter planes by dropping them from a bomber. In which they were absolutely right, it hardly gets any more awesome than that. Unfortunately, it also doesn't get much more impractical than that, which was apparently casually brushed aside to satisfy the rule of cool. Unfortunately, reason set in before it was taken in production.
I thought their mission was building an online encyclopedia. (Or as the Wikimedia Foundation puts it more generally, "... to bring free educational content to the world."
Free in that statement is about free as in freedom, not free as in beer
Last I checked .NET isn't a language.
I didn't know that the fire mentioned above was controversial, it didn't seem so from the original post. If it was, it was phrased rather misleading imo. But this experiment sounds fun too. Pick a clearly slanted article, and I'll make the anonymous edit.
"show me every page in wikitext mode" is a setting that virtually nobody would want though. I know I wouldn't want that. If that seriously would be your preference, you might be the only one. Always on visual editor (that doesn't suck and loads fast). Now that would be awsome.
So, let's put the hypothesis to the test. Which article was it? Then we can try it out, and see what happens.
You would see an unholy mess of wikitext rather than a parsed article. It's slowly getting there though. There is a visual editor - though it's far from good yet, and couldn't handle the server load of being always on. For now, you're still stuck pressing edit.
Nope. They have started a slow burn of all articles not up to their dogmatic community standards. Witness the thousands of pages of pagan-related material that a couple editors took upon themselves to remove, and then lock the discussion pages so nobody could comment on it while doing so.
Wow, really? It is incredibly bad for a discussion page to be locked. Could you give a couple of examples? Heck, even one example would be great. If this is realy true, it should be fixed immediately.
A huge percentage of edits on Wikipedia are vandalism.
[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AIV
A huge percentage of new articles are ads.
[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pending_AfC_submissions
The goal of wikipedia's admins is to drive off new editors, and anyone who tells you differently is likely a wikipedia admin.
And if they don't, they're not a real admin, right?
Sometimes that does happen too fast - but most what is fast-deleted is in fact junk. What were the articles about? Can you remember the titles, or failing that, your Wikipedia user name? I can restore them for you if you want (and they aren't junk, obviously)
wikipedia indicates that there were 5.9 million viewers in the U.S. alone, vs 2.93 million for the season opening episode. I think one can easily call this a massive success. The piracy issues seems minor in comparison.
I'm not much of a tv watcher myself, but the show I do tend to watch, Dr. Who, is free to air where I live. Without commercials too. I don't think I've ever watched it on live tv, I always pirate it purely for convenience. As long as the most convenient thing is pirating, I will continue doing so. For music on the other hand, the most convenient thing is generally spotify, so I pay the reasonable price for a subscription. The things not on spotify I pirate. Afaik Netflix is not yet available here in the Netherlands (it wasn't the last time I checked, about a year back), but if it were and there was a subscription that fit my consumer pattern, I wouldn't mind paying something for it either. Digital on demand media is getting there. Its just a matter of time. The traditional media will either adapt to the demands of a new generation of consumers, or die out and be replaced by those who do understand how to deliver what I want.
If someone can't understand "a=F/m" (or "acceleration=force/mass"), do you really think they have any idea what "acceleration is inversely proportional to mass" means?
Yes. But that's not really to the point. The point is, that equations break the flow of prose, and don't work well in explaining things, other than in a purely mathematical context. If you are not speaking about mathematics (and nobody other than mathematicians really do, and the OP is rather math related, but is not about the math of the uncertainty principle but its applications) it's best to keep equations out of it. This is obviously a rule of thumb and there are bound to be exceptions where using an equation is actually beneficial to the global understanding of the issue, but these cases are rare, and far in between. For the OP for example, I agree that not using equations was probably the right choice, though I would have made different editorial choices in the prose, and possibly using one equation (to wit, \sigma_{x}\sigma_{p} \geq \frac{\hbar}{2} ) could maybe have been defensible, but still a choice I would have disagreed with.
I would argue that very few to no popular articles need the exact formula for black body specific intensity. But if they do, the formulaic form is clearly superior. It's likelier that the article would focus on a specific aspect off blackbody radiation. To wit, I would expect the majority to talk about the ultraviolet catastrophe, and I wouldn't explain it in terms of equations at all, neither in symbolic nor in written out form.
Yes, they do a poor job in explaining things to people who don't know what the terms in the equation mean; raw math often says little if anything, by itself, about the real world, as you have to connect the mathematical items to items in the real world.
But, BTW:
I'd much rather read an article containing "because acceleration is inversely proportional to mass" than one containing "because F=ma"
...I'd rather read an article containing "because, for the same amount of force applied, acceleration is inversely proportional to mass"; my mass is much less than that of a Porsche 911, but I can't even get to 100 km/h on foot or on a bicycle, much less do so as fast as a 911 can. Given equal driving skill and the same driving techniques, however, I could probably get to 100 km/h in a 911 slightly faster than somebody weighing 100kg could in the same 911.
depending on the context that could be a good idea, though an example doesn't immediately come to mind. Completeness may be sacrificed for clarity if there is sufficient context. my above example is obviously a snippet without context, and as such is quite incorrect on it's own, but would also never occur in practice on its own. All context that I can imagine would make it sufficiently clear, especially since nobody would be thinking that acceleration would be a function of mass alone. It's almost like writing articles is a profession that requires more than stringing words together that are correct.
Without math, it's impossible to convey what you're trying to convey. The press is way too dumbed down already, and many times I've read science stories that are just plain misleading as they try to simplify the message.
Putting equations into news stories means that some people won't understand them, but most importantly it will encourage some of those people to investigate further, and learn how to read equations. If there's no math in the popular press in the first place, then there's no incentive for people to improve themselves.
no equations doesn't mean no math. Equations generally do a pretty poor job in explaining things. I'd much rather read an article containing "because acceleration is inversely proportional to mass" than one containing "because F=ma"
It was a direct result on the ~2006-2010 "lolwikipedia so unreliable" what was getting heard more and more (notice how you rarely hear this anymore), for better and for worse.
We might. Vast changes will be needed though, and in a manner that is carried by the current community (or else everyone will leave, and the current content will also start to degrade rapidly. Say what you want about the current community, but they are excellent at policing stuff). The idea for a separate draft namespace has been floating around. I don't really mind the idea of making the main mainspace less Wiki, wiki isn't the right model for mature articles anyway. Getting back a 'real' wiki with all its pros and cons where Wikipedia (which will then be a 'fake' wiki; it will run wiki software, but not a wiki philosopy) can cherry pick from isn't so bad. Maybe this could even be its own project. I'm not sure yet. As long as that wiki/namespace is not scared of being called unreliable and won't think they have to respond to that they'll be fine. Being unreliable is fine, as long as you're clear about it, name the pros and cons, and people know where they stand when using the content. Spam might still be a problem. I'm not sure how big of a problem. As long as you're relatively invisible, spammers don't take interest.
This is the important part. I think the Wikimodel is an amazing model at creating content to solidly mediocre to pretty decent levels. To a very good level, not so much. Maintaining a very good level, even much less so. When we started getting more articles across that line (and I'm not fooling myself thinking that a significant fraction is, but a significant absolute number certainly is), the Wikimodel started breaking down, and the community slowly moved away from it. Maybe it will please you to know the jubilant spirit of ~2008-2010 where we felt we were invincible is gone, and many acknowledge we do indeed have a problem with our community. The threshold for joining the community has almost certainly risen. We're working on it though, and to attempt to steer back to the original topic, making at least one hindrance easier to overcome - the arcane editing interface.
With the increased readership and social relevance of Wikipedia, the community started to care more about the overall quality of the project. A bad article was more and more seen as a problem, rather than as a start for something great. It was pretty much the price of success; one could even argue that as much earlier Wikipedia was better for its community, so much better is it now for its readers. How we can get the energy and spunk of the earlier years back, while maintaining the relevance and overall higher quality of the more recent years is the great challenge Wikipedia currently faces.
At the same time, while I agree there is a lot of bad, the situation isn't quite as grim as you make it out to be. I think that your picture of Wikipedia of 2006-2007 is a little too rosy too. Maybe the ugly was already there, or was at least there in part, but you just hadn't really run in to it. I created my account in 2005 and ran for admin in 2008, so I was certainly around during those years. When I look over the history of the Bristol Palin article, I see a prod, which was removed by the very next editor (not you), and an AfD which, well, saying one had to fight ones way to keep it is not really the reality of that discussion.
That would have helped, but I would have still walked away upset that basically an admin can try to abuse the system without any sort of consequence. I think a more appropriate response would have been, "here's a pretty baseless accusation of sockpuppetry; let's look into this some more."
On the other hand, when an editor has genuine concerns someone might be abusing the system by sockpuppeting, even is misguided, we shouldn't be discouraging them of expressing them, and having someone take a look at that. There should be no consequence on being mistaken, and acting upon it. There is a lot of funny business going on. A problem is that the request for a check in itself feels like an accusation. An apology from the admin in question, or the denying SPI clerk might have been ice though. I'm going to give this some thought, and see if I can come up with something reasonable.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'send stuff to moderation'. Also I see no significant difference between ANI in 2007 and ANI now. Also, show me the most recent indef block for edit warring that wasn't repealed on request, and you think shouldn't have happened. I have no metrics for number of protected articles, and sadly, this isn't easily queryable for historical data, but if you do, that would be an interesting metric. Did you get that somewhere, or is that from memory?
2006 begs to differ Quick anecdotical evidence from AfD logs (looking back to 2004) doesn't show what you are saying.
Are you using a page that indicates the growth in number of articles is slowing down as an argument against that the readership is still growing? That doesn't make sense.
I've been around a while. The way this was done was genuine consensus. A well regarded established editor who disagreed was not disciplined and there was not a majority rules coalition. The downside was that fringe material got into articles, though usually marked as fringe. The upside was that articles reflected the wikipedia community. Today articles more closely represent the academic / business / mainstream context and that's accomplished by threatening editors.
so... what should I do that can both relief my concerns and not scare away the new editor(s) in case I'm wrong?
The visual editor will help some as it lowers the barrier for small edits. Small edits can make a huge difference to articles so that's a good thing.
agreed
You do have authority figures.
who?
the victory of deletionists 5 years ago
it's slowly turning around, fortunately. Check AfD and compare to say 3 years back.
the change of admin from being a shop keeping function to a privileged clique
I still generally find it mop-up-on-isle-5
summary bans instead of arbitration committee process
are you pleading for authority figures now? While ArbCom was given the ability to ban users in case the community can't figure out whether or not to ban, that responsibility lies primarily with the community, not with ArbCom. Letting ArbCom decide on all possible bans is exactly the power that we don't want to give it, but want to retain with the community
etc... has turned Wikipedia into a thoroughly unpleasant community.
No argument from me that we are not going in the right direction, behaviourally. That's basically what I am saying above.
And there is no question there is a hierarchy in place and cruel indifferent one at that. Wikipedia was growing incredibly 2004-8. It aimed to change the world and it was. 2008-2013 it is a pretty cool website.
Wikipedia has more readers than ever. An optimist could say it aimed to change the world and it has. But there is a long way to go. Broader inclusion criteria and a better editing climate is certainly part of that.
Would it had helped if the almost legalese of "Lack of evidence has led this case to languish; closing this case without prejudice against the opening of a new one if further evidence should present." would have been phrases differently, possibly something along the lines as "there is insufficient evidence to justify opening checkuser records for this case. A new request can be made, but more solid evidence have to be presented to make it plausible these accounts are connected"? This is almost certainly also how the requesting admin had read it.
This has nothing to do with their position as admin by the way, a non-admin could have done exactly the same, with pretty much the same traction (a very very new user, say, less than 100 edits might be looked at with a little more reserve, even if that is against policy, but a editor with some 1000 edits would have been treated the same as an admin), but the knowledge of the system certainly is an issue.
As far as addressing behavioural issues, we have hardly anything in place, which is an acknowledged problem all round, from admins who get too little feedback on what they are doing wrong, to fringe nutcases who know their way around, but are still fringe nutcases and push all sorts of nonsense. We're unsure how to address the problem, as our system is supposed to be self regulating, but really isn't. What should happen, is that we should stop being scared of telling others in good standing when they make mistakes, without it becoming a lynch mob. That's easier said than done though, and we have unintentionally harbored a situation where criticism on an action is easily interpreted as an attack to a person. That's a culture that is not easily broken.
we both felt a bit odd as there wasn't a need to. It's a statue and a statue is free game
Federal claims court disagrees, it's in the freedom of panorama link you replied to. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise when it has just been pointed out to you.