[WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia and the poison of procedural literalism

[Delirium]

Wily D wrote:
> 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.
>   
I'm a bit late on this post, but really policies are only quoted 
literally to support arguments, not actually enforced literally. What's 
actually enforced is consensus, which the written policy pages often lag 
behind or don't capture at all. Now once an existing consensus (or 
compromise, or something similar) is written into policy, it does tend 
to be somewhat effective to quote it to influence future consensus ("but 
[[WP:SOMETHING]] says...!"), but it's not a legal code or anything.

Even more fun fact: policy varies widely by subject area. If your 
favorite supposed policy is very unpopular among the majority of editors 
in an area, it for most purposes isn't policy in that area.

-Mark