On 1/20/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I went through a rather tortured process yesterday in which I had to really put my foot down to put a stop to a CfD vote which was taking place without _any_ community dialogue or discussion first.
This appears to be the preferred way of proceeding for many: try to beat a bad idea into the ground *rather than* discuss it.
Presumably, that's the way COMMUNITY CONSENSUS works!
That seems to be the trend throughout Wikipedia; I'm sure that you can recall a number of cases in the recent past where trying to delete things without attempting to engage in discussion has caused trouble ;-)
The solution is to stop treating all of these issues with such urgency. Nobody will die because Article X or Category Y exist in a "bad" state for a few days while we talk things over.
Our byzantine system of deletion rules doesn't help, of course; there's an enormous benefit to getting an AFD result on something quickly, since it can then be used to bludgeon everyone else (with the "re-creation of deleted material" CSD clause, or simply to cry that there was "no consensus to delete/merge/whatever" if anyone tries to make major changes).
The other option would be to transwiki "Don't be a dick" back to en: and to link to it prominently on every policy page ;-)
Kirill Lokshin