Ec wrote:
The entire policy adoption process is remarkably fucked up. It favours the policy wonks with private agendas who have the time and tenacity to ensure that their favorite views will prevail. The corpus of our policies (including guidlines and other pseudo policies) is so huge that it becomes easy for anyone to plant a policy virus whose infective nature will not be noticed until much later. At that point the supporters of a change can offer nothing but a glib response to the effect that you should have said something about it earlier...
Ayup. And that's pretty much inevitable, given the way anyone can edit anything. (On Wikipedia, just as someone observed about the the Internet at large, the lunatics aren't just running the asylum, they designed and built it...)
It's easy to imagine one remedy, though. We already claim that we're a pretty fluid, evolving place. So when a policy is found not to be working, or otherwise comes up for review, and there's a move afoot to change it, we should work harder at reminding ourselves that "because we've had it for a while" is *not* anything like a sufficient reason for blindly keeping that way. If we've got a policy that has come into question, and if there's no rationale written down for it and no record of the alleged consensus that originally fostered it, then we should feel free to start with a blank slate, to draft a new policy based on today's needs and emerging consensus, without being unduly bound by "tradition".
(I'm not saying to always throw out tradition, of course -- if a tradition is good and still enjoys consensus, then of course we can keep it.)
...that it has been here so long it can only be changed if a consensus to change is first achieved.
That's a real problem, too, of course, because it can be stupefyingly difficult to achieve consensus on these contentious policy issues.
Part of the problem is that people get really stubbornly entrenched. I think we need to work harder at remembering that the spirit of compromise that's inherent in NPOV applies (or ought to apply) in project space as well as article space. It seems to me that, too often, the same editors and admins who will scold the fractious editors of a controversial article, insisting that they set their personal agendas aside and find a middle ground, will turn around and stonewall each other just as fractiously when they get involved in a policy debate.