On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
In a recent discussion on the Wiki someone made a
proposal which began
"In the case of biographies of living people, where a number of
editors have expressed the opinion either (...)".
One of the outspoken critics of the general class of proposal began
his retort "First, what is 'a number'? As a mathematician I'll tell
you that 0 is a number."
Now, I didn't particularly support this proposal either, ... but I'm
not about to argue that zero users fits the proposed criteria. In the
same general set of proposals there were a couple of people earnestly
arguging that some change to AfD closure procedure could be expected
to result in the deletion of [[George W. Bush]] and [[Bill Clinton]].
... I don't think the particulars of the proposal are relevant for
the meta-issue I'm raising here, if you want to argue about BLP and
AfD there is a dandy discussion going on on the wiki...
But how can the project ever hope to continuing surviving when people
slash at honest proposals with outrageously literalistic arguments
like this?
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The problem, Greg, is that policies on English Wikipedia are almost
uniformly horribly vague, and so if you have to figure out what they
mean by ''reading'' them, you're likely to come to errant conclusions
- but the reality is that most editors do figure out what they mean by
reading them, and misunderstandings about. Realistically new BLP
handling situations probably won't result in [[Bill Clinton]] being
deleted - but as long as they're written to allow this, the policy is
wrong, not the person suggesting perhaps the policy should say what it
means.
Policies are often enforced with the same kind of literalist mindset
... so it makes sense to evaluate proposals that way.
Cheers
WilyD