On Thursday, June 23, 2005 7:57 PM, Jon thagudearbh@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
[Snip whether the MoS is policy]
SlimVirgin, supported by others, argued that it would need a consensus vote.
I truely hope that this is not in fact what SlimVirgin and the others meant, as, if so, it shows a distressingly great misunderstanding of what policy is; the result of votes it is not. A few examples at random would be No Personal Attacks, No Original Research, the Deletion Policy, the Sockpuppet policy, amongst others. Oh, and this little one called "NPOV". None of these started as consensus polls, nor were not considered 'policy' until they had managed to muster such support.
And, BTW, you probably meant "consensus poll"; votes are binding, and we just don't /do/ binding polls, a.k.a. votes, on Wikipedia (even in the case of the selection of members of the Arbitration Committee, it is, in the end, just appointment by Jimbo as he sees fit, whether guided by the results of the poll of users or not).
Yours,