[Wikipedia-l] Re: Policy

Sat Sep 28 19:24:31 UTC 2002

Cunctator wrote:

>>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.
>>
Why have a policy in the first place, then?

>
>  4. You can express your disagreement on the Talk page or on meta or on
>   your user page or on the mailing list.
>
I thought your point was that everybody should just be editing the 
policy if they disagreed ("policy is decided by editing the policy 
pages"), so then this would not be an option.

>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."
>
There's a big difference between Wikipedia articles and policy pages. 
The articles are about things that we do not have control of. We may 
have opinions about them, but it's been agreed that we try to present 
these opinions neutrally. However, we DO have control over the Wikipedia 
policies, and our own opinions DO count. Even if I'm reasonable, my 
opinion on many issue may be completely different with that of other 
Wikipedians (it frequently is), but there is no NPOV to "neutralise" our 
policies. The only way to change or formulate policy is by discussing it 
first. The policy pages are meant for Wikipedians to use as a reference. 
If I'd just go and change it to my personal opinion, that gives a wrong 
picture (unless that personal opinions happens to be the de facto 
policy) and things could get really messed up.