On 9/27/02 12:58 AM, "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu> wrote: Yes, I do. And so should everyone else.

The Cunctator wrote: IOW, the policy pages _describe_ project policy, they don't _define_ it. It's been frequently noted that policy and documentation pages aren't always consistent with practice. Sometimes this means the pages should be changed, sometimes this means practice should be changed, sometimes it means both. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brion VIBBER wrote: What was being discussed was your modifying policy *pages*. That doesn't change what the policy *is*, implicitly or explicitly. Implicit change in policy: change over time in de facto behaviour. Explicit change in policy: discussion that results in a policy decision. Editing policy pages is an appropriate response to either of these, but it is not either of these. This would be an edit that responds to an implicit change in policy. Very reasonable. It would not be a change in policy itself. If you edit a policy page to say that something is policy when it isn't, then you're not changing policy, you're lying about policy. And this paragraph quite at odds with your previous paragraph. After you edit a policy page to reflect a policy that you disagree with, do you then change it right back since you think that it would be detrimental to follow the policy that you disagree with? Presumably not, because you *are* a reasonable (and good) person. That doesn't seem to be the same as what Cunc said at all. More precisely, it seems to be the same as Cunc's second paragraph, and antithetical to his first and third paragraphs. My understanding is that policy is to be decided (or defined if you will) by discussion on talk pages and the mailing list (and in theory meta). People have said as much here before without confrontation. Once that has been done, the policy page should reflect the decision; that much should be obvious. Mav described an edit that Cunc made to (not a policy page as such but) the part at the beginning of [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] that describes (or should describe) the policy for using that page. Mav didn't think it had been discussed properly (and it certainly didn't reflect de facto practice), which is why he thought that it should be confirmed by the list. So if mav was right about the lack of discussion, and I've been right about how policy is decided, then mav was right that the edit was premature. I would like to be able to cite policy pages when I want to cite policy. Thus, it's important that these pages (and the policy sections of other pages) be accurate about what the policy actually is. In particular, if policy is in the process of being discussed (and thus decided, or defined), policy pages shouldn't be edited to reflect the opinion of one side of the discussion. Right. But editing the policy page is not the way to decide the issue. I hope that you agree. -- Toby

On Sat, 2002-09-28 at 01:24, The Cunctator wrote: Side note: I do agree, if by "decide the issue" one means "make an immutable decision". Under that definition, no policy issue should ever be decided. Thus editing the policy page is not the way to decide the issue, but neither is anything else. Now if "decide the issue" means to come up with a mutable decision, with some acceptable degree of error, then editing the policy page is the way.

On 9/28/02 7:42 AM, "Andre Engels" <engels(a)uni-koblenz.de> wrote: That's as absurd as saying, Doing it your way would either lead to dictatorship of the most bold subscribed ones, or to flame wars. First, those choices are not the only ones; second, your reasoning with #2 is flawed. Your other choices: 3. You can simply ignore the policy, as you have done in practice. 4. You can express your disagreement on the Talk page or on meta or on your user page or on the mailing list. The flawed reasoning with #2 is simply that changes to a page do not an edit war necessarily make. If that were so, then Wikipedia wouldn't work. A quote from the FAQ: "We assume that the world is full of reasonable people and that collectively they can arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion, despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers. It's called optimism."

The Cunctator wrote: I don't know about "is" decided. I've only noticed you doing this; others at least mention the edit in the policy page's talk page, thus explicitly inviting discussion. I don't see what's hierarchical about the mailing list, much less talk pages. I do agree that discussing every policy change is bureaucratic, but that's because I forgot to mention that most policy changes are the implicit kind, changed because of a change in actual practice. But these are the policies that are rarely written down; we discuss policy that's written up on pages, these days. The problem is that policy pages will be inaccurate if they are changed to what policy should be but is not. (Unless you think that policy is defined to be whatever's on the page, an unlikely position if a vandal replaces the text with "This is stupid.".) OTOH, policy proposals can be edited in the wiki way on talk pages (which is the best place for it; I don't like the mailing list format either). While I've only noticed you edit major policy pages without discussion, I've noticed several occasions where text was edited on a talk page before being incorporated into the policy page itself, so that agreement could be established for the new text before it appeared on the page. This is an encyclopaedia; we strive for accuracy ^_^. -- Toby