[WikiEN-l] The heart of the deletion problem

Mon Dec 12 20:24:42 UTC 2005

Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

>Without the very
>strict ruleset that we have (which, by the way, arose quite naturally,
>none of the rules excepting the core principles was forced, all of
>them came out from consensus) it would never work.
>
This is not consistent with reality.  The only consensus is built by and 
from people who like rules.  Many people just go about their daily 
business of improving articles in the subjects that interest them, and 
have done so back to a time before those rules were "adopted".  A person 
who has done this for say three years will be completely surprised and 
shocked when a newbie administrator suddenly attempts to impose a rule 
that was "adopted by consensus" one year ago.  For that newbie the rule 
is law, and he won't hear of having  the rule reconsidered no matter how 
inappropriate the rule.  Dedicated editors do not spend their time 
paying attention to the nuances of rule-making; if they did they would 
never get anything useful done.

Ec