Maveric149 wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
I'm ashamed to see "if the community doesn't like it then it must change" coming from such a respected member of the community -- it is the death knell of a community of individuals.
Huh? So community standards should not apply to anything and individuals should be allowed to do whatever they want?
Within reason, yes.
Policy is formed by consensus. That means that the /community/ (the collection of individuals) has made the decision.
But it doesn't mean that it's good for the community to force something simply because they have a consensus (much less merely a majority vote). We are writing an encylcopaedia -- that is fundamental and basic. Our encyclopaedia is NPOV -- one of its foundational principles. These are matters on which the community should hold firm. But to say that the community should, just because most people want to, change a person's username -- or other directly personal matters -- certainly does not follow. There must be a good reason.
I'm not saying that you haven't given any reasons. Drolsi's name was called offensive, inflammatory, etc; and people gave arguments as to why it hurt the project. But that's not the comment that I was responding to. Rather, the comment that I was responding to said simply "if the community doesn't like it then it must change", and that is terribly, terribly wrong. (OK, you also said "other people have to see it" -- but that's a pretty darned generic situation.)
Nor does it mean that I should have the authority to step in and say "Community, you are in error. You should not do this." and overrule a clear consensus (should one develop on some issue). That would also be wrong, albeit for different reasons. However, if the community decided to force some consensus preference, and if this were something egregious enough, that it ought not to force, then I might be in a position where I would decide that I must leave, or would try to convince Jimbo to withdraw support, or something.
For an extreme example, suppose that the community -- say by a broad consensus -- believed that Wikipedia should be POV, adopting, for example, a secular humanist viewpoint on all matters. Even though I am a secular humanist, I would still be appalled; and if Jimbo didn't realise what was happening, I'd be sure to tell him; and if I couldn't stop the consensus from being implemented, then I'd leave. Now this isn't very likely; but the fact (or my opinion if you prefer) would remain that such a community decision would be WRONG.
So in this case "if the community doesn't like it then it must change" is in error. And when the community believes this -- when it enforces all of its opinions, whether they're reasonable to enforce or not -- then it has stopped being a community of individuals and instead become a collective enforcing its will upon others. And not that I should be given the power to stop this, because I should not have such power over the community, but it would still be a bad thing if the community reached this point.
You reasoning doesn't make /any/ sense at all.
It's not a particularly great specimen of reasoning, given that I wasn't so much drawing a conclusion (not arguing that we should /not/ force a name change) as claiming that /your/ principle was not valid reasoning. I deny "if the community doesn't like it then it must change"; but I'm not affirming the opposite, or anything like that.
Having responded to your specific comments regarding my post, I'm going to ramble a bit more about community decision making.
People should not try to make decisions very much. Ideally, decisions should be decentralised, made by a few people with the interest to get very involved. Most decisions on Wikipedia are made in this way; they are decisions about how to edit articles, and they're usually made by a small number of people. On rarely watched articles, this is only one person (in the short term). On other articles with more people involved, it's a larger group. But only on rare occasions does the en.Wikipedia "community" (which to judge from Drolsi's case is about 30 mailing list subscribers) get involved to make a group decision. This is a good thing!
Then there is policy. If a policy is broad and affects many people, then it's only right that many people should be involved in it. And this is one reason why broad policies ought to be few. We started out with NPOV and "Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia.". Then we added naming conventions, deletion policy, and the MoS. To a certain extent, these are things that needed to be decided; and while I personally believe that we have too many policies (to some degree or another) about all of these items, still that's not my point here; my point is simply that broad policies should be few so that everybody can be involved in them. Policies that affect fewer people can be more numerous, because fewer people need to get involved in them. That way, we retain the principle that each Wikipedian can be involved in those policies that affect them individually. (I believe that we fall short of this right now, although we probably do better than most online communities our size.)
All this is about the /content/ of the encyclopaedia. This content is by far the most important part of Wikipedia. After all, that's we came here to work on in the first place; the community was created for the encyclopaedia, not the encyclopaedia for the community. But the meta material -- talk pages, user pages, etc -- is less important, so there's less need for community consensus. Furthermore, this material is more personal, so a /community/ decision is, usually, simply not appropriate! If the community decided that your userpage or mine ought to contain a different description of ourselves, then in most situations this would not be right. Even if there were a consensus (among the others) to impose this, still it would not be a good idea for the community to do this. And it would imply a community that had lost sight of our purpose here -- to write an encyclopaedia -- and become more interested in enforcing (and forming in the first place) community norms for userpages. The same goes for comments on talk pages, edit summaries, and, yes, even usernames.
So there must be a reason, and a stronger reason than would be needed in the forming of a consensus for an article or even a policy page. Those pages are written by the community and need community support, while other items are written by individual users and need less support. In the case of Drolsi's name, some reasons have been given -- offensiveness, professionalism, trust by downstream users -- and while I found many of the reasons spurious, others were good points. So we can weigh those reasons and see if they justify the community (by consensus, or -- if the reasons are stronger yet -- even by only a majority vote) to interfere in an individual user's personal identity on Wikipedia; we can even make general policies. But just because something is the will of the community, much less the will of a majority of the community with serious dissent, does not make it right.
Whatever one may think about the particulars of this case, it is, to me, a fundamentally important principle in /all/ of life not to impose personal decisions on other people in ordinary cases. This is a matter of basic freedom, and human dignity, not just in matters of state (where we all probably agree), but in all walks of life whatsoever.
-- Toby