On Feb 1, 2008, at 7:14 PM, Ian Woollard 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. What, exactly, do people object to? -Phil

On Feb 1, 2008 6:25 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)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. However, it's foolish to consider writing guidelines without any reference to other, pre-existing ones. -Matt

On 04/02/2008, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: "We" in this context is the community - a higher authority that either Jimbo or Arbcom.

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 Thursday 07 February 2008 22:47, Steve Bennett wrote: This is correct. These are incorrect. -- Kurt Weber <kmw(a)armory.com>

On Thursday 07 February 2008 23:07, The Mangoe wrote: 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(a)armory.com>

Lets try to keep the name calling to a minimum, even if in general. Regards, NAthan -----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] WP:LEAD On Thursday 07 February 2008 23:07, The Mangoe wrote: 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(a)armory.com> _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

On 03/02/2008, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.