On 24/09/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
It's easy to imagine we need lots of reasonably hard rules, because everyone knows that people are imperfect, and that asking them to "be reasonable" or to "follow the spirit of the guidelines" doesn't always work. So the goal is to remove imperfect, subjective human judgement from the equation, and replace it with a complete, cohesive, consistent set of nicely objective rules, which will ensure magnificently coordinated, correct behavior. And that might work, *if* the rules were in fact complete, cohesive, and consistent.
Thank you! I forgot the "grand unified process for everything" factor when you get a bunch of aspergic geeks with an allergy for grey areas in one place. Here's my version of that:
The grand unified process for everything!
Occasionally people come along who think it should be possible to proceduralise and hence automate as much of Wikipedia process as possible. Human judgement is flawed, imperfect and subject to bias. The flaws here are:
1. The core policies imply human judgement. You can't Taylorise clue. 2. The rules are not complete, coherent or consistent; they cannot be made so without a complete rewrite, which is profoundly unlikely to achieve consensus. 3. Humans are not robots. * No-one reads the whole Manual of Style before editing. Or after. I haven't and neither have you. * The more hard rules, the harder it is for people to follow them. So they won't. 4. Grey areas are what make human interaction interesting. Attempting to remove them will make for (a) a lot of arbitrary decisions on black versus white (b) a lot of frustrated people who leave. 5. The real world contains politics. Everyone with an agenda to push will seek to have their bias encoded. Especially those working in the best interests of all.
In the worst case, you end up with a lose-lose situation: the rules exact their cost (stifling initiative or creativity, taking on a life of their own requiring significant resources to maintain, parasitizing the rest of the enterprise), while delivering none of the benefits. You then also bear the costs of no rules: fallible human judgement and the anarchy of people doing what they want and fighting over whether they're allowed to.
As WP:POINT starts: Wikipedia is inconsistent, and Wikipedia permits things it does not condone.
- d.