On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
In a recent discussion on the Wiki someone made a proposal which began "In the case of biographies of living people, where a number of editors have expressed the opinion either (...)". One of the outspoken critics of the general class of proposal began his retort "First, what is 'a number'? As a mathematician I'll tell you that 0 is a number."
Now, I didn't particularly support this proposal either, ... but I'm not about to argue that zero users fits the proposed criteria. In the same general set of proposals there were a couple of people earnestly arguging that some change to AfD closure procedure could be expected to result in the deletion of [[George W. Bush]] and [[Bill Clinton]]. ... I don't think the particulars of the proposal are relevant for the meta-issue I'm raising here, if you want to argue about BLP and AfD there is a dandy discussion going on on the wiki...
But how can the project ever hope to continuing surviving when people slash at honest proposals with outrageously literalistic arguments like this?
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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.
Cheers WilyD