On 1/20/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I went through a rather tortured process yesterday
in which I had to
really put my foot down to put a stop to a CfD vote which was taking
place without _any_ community dialogue or discussion first.
This appears to be the preferred way of proceeding for many: try to
beat a bad idea into the ground *rather than* discuss it.
Presumably, that's the way COMMUNITY CONSENSUS works!
That seems to be the trend throughout Wikipedia; I'm sure that you can
recall a number of cases in the recent past where trying to delete
things without attempting to engage in discussion has caused trouble
;-)
The solution is to stop treating all of these issues with such
urgency. Nobody will die because Article X or Category Y exist in a
"bad" state for a few days while we talk things over.
Our byzantine system of deletion rules doesn't help, of course;
there's an enormous benefit to getting an AFD result on something
quickly, since it can then be used to bludgeon everyone else (with the
"re-creation of deleted material" CSD clause, or simply to cry that
there was "no consensus to delete/merge/whatever" if anyone tries to
make major changes).
The other option would be to transwiki "Don't be a dick" back to en:
and to link to it prominently on every policy page ;-)
Once I got *very* annoyed with an editor who had obviously not
discovered the "Preview" button and whipped up {{preview}} to redirect
to [[Wikipedia:Preview]] (or whatever it is); I then subst:ed it onto
their talk page. IIRC I reverted myself, the template went to TfD, and
was saved after I or someone else wrote something sensible there.
But yeah, I can see cases where subst:ing [[Wikipedia:Don't be a dick]]
in all it's glory onto someone's talk page would have the desired effect.
--
Alphax -
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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