When some people started trying to use the BLP policies to cover the
deceased, I realised that not even the most precise wording could
protect against the lack of common sense.
When some people took the arb com restriction during their discussion
of episodes and characters to refer to exactly that type of articles
only, and succeeded in establishing it, this confirmed my view.
When a respected admin argued at Deletion Review that speedy deletion
policy covers removing duplicate articles, I realised we need both
exact policy , and the will to back it up.
On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Wily D
<wilydoppelganger(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The problem, Greg, is that policies on English
Wikipedia are almost
uniformly horribly vague, and so if you have to figure out what they
[snip]
Policies are often enforced with the same kind
of literalist mindset
... so it makes sense to evaluate proposals that way.
Certantiantly vagueness can cause problems... so it's in everyone's
interest to avoid vagueness, policy proposers, supporters, opposers,
and neutralists alike. If people can come to an agreement on a
meaning then establishing a non-vague expression may take some effort,
but it's mostly an effort of copyediting not something deserving an
argument.
The issue I was trying to raise is that someone proposed a requirement
of "a number of Wikipedians" which was countered with "Zero is a
number" ... and If you're willing to take that literal an
interpretation no policy can avoid being vague or having significant
unintended consequences.
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--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG