So let me see if I have this straight.
As long as a user holds strictly to written policy, he/she may cause
as much disruption, damage and hell as possible, and community
consensus on a matter is secondary to ill-thought-out and often
unenforced legalistic jargon.
Does that pretty much sum it up?
-Hephaestos
A Wikipedia administrator needs to be thoroughly
familiar with those
parts of Wikipedia policy they chose to deploy. Many of us never
block anybody. Those who do need to know what is permitted and what
is not. That is laid out on the page [[Wikipedia:Blocking policy]].
What the arbitration committee is trying to do is to craft a remedy
for those instances where administrators are making up their own
policy, perhaps to some extent in reliance on community consensus
but nevertheless expanding their actions beyond those set forth in
blocking policy. Certain parts of that policy are somewhat
ambiguous but it is a limited policy which permits blocks only in
certain cases. Not in every case where it "feels right" or in every
case where "something has to be done".
Fred
From: Rick <giantsrick13(a)yahoo.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 23:04:58 -0700 (PDT)
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Blocking policy
This "rule" requires sysops to have to have all of the policy pages
available at hand. Fine. Then give me a table of contents.
RickK