o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o Daniel R. Tobias wrote: Yes, that is a problem. I'm trying to summarize the types of things that I have seen happen repeatedly over the past six months, and I'm pretty much discounting the first month's experience when I was still learning the ropes. I wouldn't be bothering about it if it were just a few isolated incidents, and when I have detailed a few of these, the response is always the "few bad apples" defense. But these are persistent, recurrent, and systematic patterns of events that I've observed. The first dozen times you see things going haywire, and by that I mean people behaving contrary to the main Policies of Wikipedia, you think all you have to do is read them the policies and they will straighten up and fly right. But that is not what happens, and in my experience it only gets worse when you try to use WQAs, RFCs, and so on, and that is because the people who intervene do not bother to check the histories and do not care about the main policies either, but simply wing it on the basis of their own POVs and biases. In trying to understand a systematic problem, you have to try and come up with systematic hypotheses as to why the same damn things keep happening. I pointed to one sort of thing that I see happening over and over, and for ease of reference I gave it the name "priority inversion". A priority inversion is when people spend more time worrying over the dust under the couch than they do the elephant in the room. One example of this is when 2 or 3 editors declare a consensus about an issue and use that to trump the major Policies of WP, namely NOR, NPOV, VERIFY, or the Guidelines that are listed under the Five Pillars. There are two things that are wrong with this kind of tactic: (1) it is contrary to both the dictionary definition and the WP definition of consensus, which means absence of dissent, and (2) it violates the main [[WP:Policy]] pages that say that NOR, NPOV, and VERIFY are non-negotiable and cannot be trumped by other policies or by editors' consensus, even a geunine univesal consensus of local editors. For example, under the proper ordering of priorities a statement that is relevant and sourced should not be deleted in favor of an opinion that is unsourced just because the source is not the favorite writer of 2 or 3 editors or because the sourced statement contradicts the personal POVs of 2 or 3 editors. But this is actually the routine way that things are done in WP. Now, if you've never experienced a situation where the editors working on a given article engaged in this kind of conduct, then you have been very lucky, and you will not know what I mean. But I can only report my own observations that it happens quite a lot. What it means is that the quality of articles goes down in proportion to the non-compliance with the primary WP policies. Jon Awbrey o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Jon_Awbrey o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o