With some of the other policies like NOR or COI, we are dealing with a problem that hasn't been met anywhere else to quite the same degree- a reputable hardcopy editor would almost never assign an article to somebody to write about themselves, but in the Wikipedia we have much less control over the authorship; so decision making, which often takes the form of consensus on these policies in some form or other is inevitable, there's far less prior art to consider.
But there's many problems with the concept of consensus in the wikipedia and elsewhere. The Bay of Pigs is often offered as a classic example of what can go wrong. The Kennedy administration had consensus, but if anything that was the problem.
In the wikipedia, where a physical bloodbath is less likely ;-), consensus often seems to involve the views of those who are most visibly asserting 'consensus' on the talk page; while this isn't in and of itself *necessarily* a negative, it's not always clear that we have *informed* consensus occurring, and particularly in WP:LEAD.
People are drawing only on their own experiences of introductions (which are never going to be in the context of an encyclopedia) and where the people are evidently not seeking out the general experiences that go back *centuries* on this particular topic; indeed people here and there are denying that it is even a good idea to check prior art.
I cannot be kind about this, these people are engaging in, or recommending OR, and are trying to hide behind the cloak of consensus.
We don't want or need consensus in the Wikipedia, we want *informed* consensus.
On 08/02/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/02/2008, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
Well, if you don't want policy to be prescriptive, then you will have to give up citing it. It seems to be the policy (in sense 1) that policy functions in sense 2 and maybe even sense 3.
Citing policy is just shorthand for citing already establish consensus. Unless there is a specific reason to believe that consensus has changed, it's generally safe to assume the policy page is an accurate representation of current consensus. (This may be slightly closer to sense 2 than sense 1.)
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