Kelly Martin wrote:
On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If there are hordes of invading POV-pushers hooking up with each other, that's the problem to deal with. They're not going to be encouraged or deterred by whether they have to type 15 vs 30 characters to do it. Mechanism is not policy.
What is "mechanism is not policy" supposed to mean? We use mechanisms to enforce policy, both hard policy and soft policy. It's perfectly reasonable for us to make it more difficult to push a point of view because we don't want people doing that.
We have a settled policy that users can do pretty much anything they like on their user pages and subpages, within the bounds of civility. You can find lengthy screeds for and against all kinds of things, announcements of intent to push some POV as much as one can get away with, lists of friends and enemies, and so forth. We confuse mechanism with policy when we say that these extreme-POV user pages are OK, but that an intrinsically neutral template or category is not OK because it might be used in a POV-pushing scheme.
Personally, I would be fine with a policy that disallowed all POV-pushing on user pages, since purported NPOVers should be embarassed by their biases, not celebratory of them, but I suspect that would cause a major ruckus. (No more "I hate Bush and here's why you should too", for instance.)
Stan