WP:LEAD seems to be giving me some cause for concern.
The guideline is not completely horrible by any means, but it doesn't seem to be improving.
My concerns are:
- the article is completely unreferenced - there's a lot of simple reverts going on to apparently well meaning edits on grounds of 'lack of consensus' - the people reverting are defining consensus - taking it to the talk page doesn't seem to help much - they are trying to define the guideline independently from usage both elsewhere as well as within the wikipedia (I would have thought that guidelines for writing encyclopedia article introduction/leads would exist elsewhere, today a reference to one was added, but it lasted only a few hours and then was removed for 'lack of consensus') - given the lack of references, the editors involved seem to be defining the relative importance of things without reference to anything at all (not even the core values of the wikipedia as far as I can see)
I don't know, perhaps I'm making mountains out of molehills, as I say, it's not a completely horrible article, and if you read it quickly it sounds very reasonable, but less so when you read it very carefully, it's more the activity surrounding it.
On Feb 1, 2008, at 7:14 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
WP:LEAD seems to be giving me some cause for concern.
The guideline is not completely horrible by any means, but it doesn't seem to be improving.
What is troubling here is that this should be a straightforward MoS guideline. The standards of what makes a good introduction are uncontroversial, widely known, and relatively straightforward.
What, exactly, do people object to?
-Phil
On 02/02/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
What is troubling here is that this should be a straightforward MoS guideline. The standards of what makes a good introduction are uncontroversial, widely known, and relatively straightforward.
It's not quite so straightforward, actually the details of introductions seem to vary somewhat depending on what they are introducing, an introduction for an essay is different to the introduction for a book, is different to the introduction for an encyclopedia article. You would hope that people would look at what an encyclopedia article's introduction should look like from multiple sources, but this apparently hasn't happened at all.
What, exactly, do people object to?
There seems to be a lot of reverts on 'consensus' grounds, particularly about what the primary purpose (whatever that means really) of the introduction should be, without ever referring to any sources whatsoever.
-Phil
On Feb 1, 2008 6:25 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
There seems to be a lot of reverts on 'consensus' grounds, particularly about what the primary purpose (whatever that means really) of the introduction should be, without ever referring to any sources whatsoever.
As a guideline page in Wikipedia space, sourcing is not required. We can do things nobody else does if we feel it works.
However, it's foolish to consider writing guidelines without any reference to other, pre-existing ones.
-Matt
On 03/02/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
As a guideline page in Wikipedia space, sourcing is not required. We can do things nobody else does if we feel it works.
I don't think you can edit guidelines for 'if we feel it works'; it pushes too strongly towards edit wars. It's something you do only if everything else fails, or if the 'we' is a real authority, Arbcom or Wales or something.
-Matt
On 04/02/2008, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 03/02/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
As a guideline page in Wikipedia space, sourcing is not required. We can do things nobody else does if we feel it works.
I don't think you can edit guidelines for 'if we feel it works'; it pushes too strongly towards edit wars. It's something you do only if everything else fails, or if the 'we' is a real authority, Arbcom or Wales or something.
"We" in this context is the community - a higher authority that either Jimbo or Arbcom.
On 04/02/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
"We" in this context is the community - a higher authority that either Jimbo or Arbcom.
It's still a bad idea, there's a big difference between 'if we feel it works' and a 'this is the way it should/is going to work' DECISION statement by the community/Arbcom/Jimbo.
It bothers me that we have these policy pages changing around constantly. They should spend most of the time being locked down, with changes discussed and consensus reached before they are applied. It's particularly pernicious in cases like the late unpleasantness about WP:NPA, where it wasn't all that clear how different the changes were *from* personal attacks. But it's a problem in any case that the rules (or things that people will apply as rules) are continually in flux. (WP:NOR has 500 changes from late September, for instance.)
On 2/8/08, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
It bothers me that we have these policy pages changing around constantly. They should spend most of the time being locked down, with changes discussed and consensus reached before they are applied. It's particularly pernicious in cases like the late unpleasantness about WP:NPA, where it wasn't all that clear how different the changes were *from* personal attacks. But it's a problem in any case that the rules (or things that people will apply as rules) are continually in flux. (WP:NOR has 500 changes from late September, for instance.)
Agreed. There is little consensus over how policy operates. Various viewpoints seem to include:
1. Policy is whatever most people are doing. Policy pages simply describe this. 2. Policy is whatever most people think everyone should be doing. Policy pages describe that. 3. Policy is prescriptive, and policy pages capture the current set of rules. They should only be changed through consensus.
etc.
Steve
On Thursday 07 February 2008 22:47, Steve Bennett wrote:
Agreed. There is little consensus over how policy operates. Various viewpoints seem to include:
- Policy is whatever most people are doing. Policy pages simply describe
this.
This is correct.
- Policy is whatever most people think everyone should be doing.
Policy pages describe that. 3. Policy is prescriptive, and policy pages capture the current set of rules. They should only be changed through consensus.
These are incorrect.
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.
On Thursday 07 February 2008 23:07, The Mangoe wrote:
Well, if you don't want policy to be prescriptive, then you will have to give up citing it.
Precisely.
Actions do not follow policy; policy follows actions. Do what's right for the given situation, regardless of what some megalomaniac thinks.
On Feb 7, 2008 9:51 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
On Thursday 07 February 2008 23:07, The Mangoe wrote:
Well, if you don't want policy to be prescriptive, then you will have to give up citing it.
Precisely.
Actions do not follow policy; policy follows actions. Do what's right for the given situation, regardless of what some megalomaniac thinks. -- Kurt Weber kmw@armory.com
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Alright, I think it's right to go block you. Blocking policy be damned.
We wouldn't want policy to actually mean anything, would we?
Lets try to keep the name calling to a minimum, even if in general.
Regards,
NAthan
-----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Kurt Maxwell Weber Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 11:51 PM To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] WP:LEAD
On Thursday 07 February 2008 23:07, The Mangoe wrote:
Well, if you don't want policy to be prescriptive, then you will have to give up citing it.
Precisely.
Actions do not follow policy; policy follows actions. Do what's right for the given situation, regardless of what some megalomaniac thinks.
On Feb 8, 2008 12:51 AM, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
Actions do not follow policy; policy follows actions. Do what's right for the given situation, regardless of what some megalomaniac thinks.
Well, isn't that just regardless of what some OTHER megalomaniac thinks?
If the secret is that everyone does what is right to do, then success depends on getting rid of those who don't or won't. Since getting rid of people is something that is done, though....
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.)
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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On 2/8/08, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
On Thursday 07 February 2008 22:47, Steve Bennett wrote:
Agreed. There is little consensus over how policy operates. Various viewpoints seem to include:
- Policy is whatever most people are doing. Policy pages simply describe
this.
This is correct.
I think it's the least useful of the three definitions of policy I gave, and is tantamount to declaring Wikipedia a wilful anarchy. If policy is mere description of what people are already doing, why bother? "Editors frequently engage in edit wars. Editors frequently attempt to impose their point of view on articles". Great policy.
For policy to serve any purpose, it has to capture behaviour which is desirable and is not yet being done by everyone. For it to work, it should not appear out of the blue, but emerge through consensus as the solution to a problem.
Steve
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