Toby Bartels wrote:
I overlooked that one! Well, Mav should not have written it that way.
Indeed he would, which is why it strikes me as
especially odd in this case
that mav was seeming to impose such a dramatic change like this.
He explains that it's not dramatic -- just an extension of
our long-standing policies of openness -- and that's a good argument.
Sure, and it's a good reason to have it as a soft guideline, i.e.
'please do this'.
I think that the point that Nicholas was trying to
make
is that /if/ mav's edit (cited above) were accepted as OK,
/then/ en.Wikipedia would be making policy with no input.
But mav's edit has been challenged and doesn't stand,
so we're not actually in this position.
You (and I) know that we don't in fact work this way,
but a relatively new person might reasonably fear
that mav's edit might end up being accepted as OK.
I think that's a fair assessment all around.
You probably aren't reading the same web pages;
you in particular don't seem to have read the one cited above:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&am…
That's right, I overlooked that one. All the versions I looked at
(which was plenty, I thought!) didn't say that people MUST do
anything.
If I can get philosophical for a moment, the only MUST we have around
here is that people can't do things that would get them banned. But
you have to really work to get yourself banned. Courteously failing
to follow some guideline like this doesn't rise to that level.
To be sure, this is hardly getting anybody in
trouble.
But to a new user, that may not be so clear -- it helps to clarify.
That's right.
--Jimbo