On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Ryan Delaney wrote:
That's the point made in the OP. Apoc2400 thinks that, since the
reality is that Wikipedia has become greatly bureaucratized (he and I
think that's a bad thing, you think it's a good thing, but that's
beside the point) then we should stop kidding ourselves and get rid of
WP:BURO.
No, I do not think it is a "good thing" - where did I say that?
I think
it is important not to be confused between discussions of what is really
going on, within Wikipedia as it actually operates, and discussions at
an idealised level (normally only backed up with some anecdotal if
slight evidence). The other point I would like to make is that the
problem really comes with people who think you make a bureaucracy work
by being bureaucratic, when the opposite is true. WP:BURO is basically
prescriptive, not descriptive (I'm against people who weasel by saying
policy is basically descriptive not prescriptive whenever that suits
them), and it tells us not to do that bureaucratic thing of using
sensible procedural features in an obstructive fashion.
Charles
It sounds to me like you're both making a similar point: that is, there's
no
reason to deny the reality that Wikipedia does have some bureaucratic
elements. In the worst case, this leads to a rather Kafkaesque situation
where people who are actually obstructed by bureaucracy being told by a
bureaucrat that "Well, as you can see from our policies, this is not a
bureaucracy." In this case it helps to have 20/20 vision about the fact that
Wikipedia is, in fact, bureaucratic, because recognizing the problem is half
of solving it.
If this is your view, then you probably would agree with a less polemical
version of what I took the OP to be saying: Wikipedia *is* bureaucratic, and
we ought to be honest about that.
- causa sui