On 3/3/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
A non-scaling idea of consensus is what we call 'not a consensus'.
There used to be a fairly relaxed view of policy. That is, there was the newbie version, which was fairly aspirational, and the 'old lags' version, which tested the limits, but took various good things like 'be bold' and 'assume good faith' and 'ignore all rules' (when the situation warranted it) as central - rather than assuming there was a theory test and manual of style handed out as you came in.
You know, policy and process used to be relaxed because Wikipedia was a wholly new thing and no one had any idea how to make it work yet. We could only figure out what works through experience. But as time passed, and as experience repeated itself, we learned from it and the patterns inherent in it. There was quite a lot of naive innocence in the old days, but it couldn't last forever. What was once an amorphous mass is slowly taking shape and solidifying. As time passes it will inevitably solidify further. Corrections and adaptations will be made in an endless process, as it is with all evolving things, whether they are animals or city-states.
But the bottom line is that we've learned that some things just don't work, and so we have rules against them to help other people not make the same mistakes we did when we figured out that those things don't work. When I first came to Wikipedia I was an acrimonious editor who wrote a lot of hero worship about people he likee. Since then I've learned a better way, and we have rules about personal attacks, civility, and against original research so that other people won't make the same mistakes I did. These rules may not be broken because we know that they create a negative editing evironment. There are many other examples like this where rules and process have developed over time and experience, not drawn up arbitrarily out of thin air as some people seem to think they have been.
This has all been really stream-of-consciousness, but the point is that I'm noticing a trend here where people attack process just because it is process, not because they think it is actually wrong or harmful. Most of the time, we all agree with the rules. But those few times we disagree, don't criticize the whole idea of rules. Criticize the rules themselves. They're malleable, just like everything else here.
Ryan