[Wikipedia-l] Re: Policy

[Stephen Gilbert]

--- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 00:08, Stephen Gilbert wrote:

> > Ok, I admit it. I'm confused. I'm trying to say
> that
> > policy should be changed first, and then the
> > description should be updated to reflect the
> change.
> > You seem to be saying that the description should
> be
> > changed first, and then discussed. Your argument
> > doesn't make sense to me (or most other people, it
> > seems).
> 
> A lot of it comes down to a definition of "policy".
> What is it? Is it
> what people do? Is it what it says on the pages? Is
> it an admixture of
> the two? Is it what the most active contributor to
> Wikipedia at the time
> does? Etc. etc.

I look at Wikipedia policy as an agreement made
between Wikipedians on how to handle various issues.
 
> What I'm saying is that most changes to policy don't
> need to be
> discussed.

An odd thing to say, if policy is an agreement made
between people.

> If that assertion is true, then the best meta-policy
> is to by default
> just change the policy.
> 
> Does that reduction make more sense?

Well, it confirms what I thought you were saying.

> > There are lots of ways to edit the policy pages
> > without changing the policy they describe:
> correcting
> > typos and grammar, linking, re-writing for
> clarity.
> 
> None of those change the policy much (but they do
> change the
> policy--it's not a black and white thing)...

No, they change the pages that describe the policy.
The pages don't *define* the policy, so making
corrections and links to the *decription* doesn't
change the policy.

Let's pretent you and I are making an agreement. The
agreement is that I will borrow $20 from you now, and
pay you back $30 at the end of the month. Now, we
write this down so we'll remember: 

"The Cunctator agrees to land Stephen Gilbert $20. On
October 31, Stephen will pay him back $30."

Oops, there's a typo. You correct it; "land" becomes
"lend". Has our agreement changed?

> ...except for
> "re-writing for
> clarity". One man's clarity is another man's pea
> soup.

We agree on this, at least. :)

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com