On 03/02/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
However, it's foolish to consider writing guidelines without any reference to other, pre-existing ones.
Yes, and I think that this goes even more so for Wikipedia's *own* policy.
The people (i.e. admins) that are editing the guideline seem to be doing so without referring to the policies in any way shape or form, and it turns out that there are clear, stable, applicable policies, and the admins seem to have been systematically deemphasising and ultimately removing all mention of these policies from the guideline, denying that they are in any way important, and summarising them away.
To start with it seemed to be simply a discrepancy in style but perhaps there's something more shadowy going on; it occurs to me that there may be articles that the particular admins are involved with that don't want to be accurately defined.
The reversion to the edits are going a bit too far, and are a bit too consistent.
-Matt