On Wednesday 20 August 2003 02:00, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus and by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our best practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing down the best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be deleted, because doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten) polices of openness and transparency. Otherwise some authors may not know why their article was deleted.
Documenting best practice is not the same as documenting policy. When a programmer writes code, best practice is to comment that code, but would we really want compilers enforcing it as policy?
We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the potential avoidance of needless ill will.
Transferring the load merely transfers the ill will.
<snip story about a nearly-lost article>
This should provide more incentive to automate the process, no?
IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with could have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it; if for no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not).
"A bit more" ? There doesn't seem to have been *any* notice.
What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving some notice before he made what some view as a unilateral policy change? Or would that have been too inconvenient, since people might disagree?
And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed on VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might disagree? Two way street.
That is precisely my point. If other people are expected to conform to a policy of openness that requires extra work, that policy should be set in an open way. This one was not.