Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus and by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our best practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing down the best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be deleted, because doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten) polices of openness and transparency. Otherwise some authors may not know why their article was deleted. We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the potential avoidance of needless ill will.
For example, an article called [[Fumocy]] was recently listed on VfD without having a VfD notice placed on the article. A week passed and nobody spoke up for the article. I noticed that this apparently well-researched article was listed and I tried to confirm the title; I couldn't. I then tried to confirm some of the information on the page; I could. Apparently the author (a professional astronomer) and a few of his friends wrote the article using a brand new term for "full moon cycle" that is not yet (nor may never be) accepted by the scientific community.
Luckily instead of deleting the article I moved it to the author's userspace and then later found out all the details. The author, however, was a bit miffed that there wasn't /any/ notice left on the article that it was about to be deleted; if a notice had been there, then anybody who knew about the subject could have argued for keeping the article based on the content (although the title is wrong). If however, I deleted the article, the author would not have known why, and the readers likewise would have been denied the opportunity to defend the article. That is, unless they read every entry submited to the VfD page; but who has time or want to do that?
IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with could have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it; if for no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not).
What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving some notice before he made what some view as a unilateral policy change? Or would that have been too inconvenient, since people might disagree?
And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed on VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might disagree? Two way street.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
I don't agree with either of these sentences. I don't see any way for our policy development process to be any more open to input from the community. I can't think of a less secretive or more noisy way to organize anything. There are no back rooms here -- everything is done in public, with wide advertising throughout the system of how it's done. We're always open to suggestions, of course, but I think the system right now is a model of public accountability.
The second sentence bewilders me completely. What do your scare quotes around 'policy' mean? What do you mean by 'forcing openness'? Somehow our openness is *imposed* on the world?
And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook. The very foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate hierarchies of control.
--Jimbo
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
I don't agree with either of these sentences. I don't see any way for our policy development process to be any more open to input from the community. I can't think of a less secretive or more noisy way to organize anything. There are no back rooms here -- everything is done in public, with wide advertising throughout the system of how it's done. We're always open to suggestions, of course, but I think the system right now is a model of public accountability.
The system right now may have been good in your opinion, but it was developed without input or notice of many wikipedians. Maybe some had little input; maybe it was developed a year or two ago when many of us hadn't joined wikipedia. But either way, some wikipedians oppose the system, so it must be reconsidered
The second sentence bewilders me completely. What do your scare quotes around 'policy' mean? What do you mean by 'forcing openness'? Somehow our openness is *imposed* on the world?
We are forced to write the deletion notice. Basically, you are forcing us, and the other wikipedians, to use deletion notices.
And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook. The very foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate hierarchies of control.
--Jimbo
I don't like the use of "unwashed masses" either LDan
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Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
The system right now may have been good in your opinion, but it was developed without input or notice of many wikipedians.
That's simply not true.
Maybe some had little input; maybe it was developed a year or two ago when many of us hadn't joined wikipedia. But either way, some wikipedians oppose the system, so it must be reconsidered
Well, everything can be reconsidered, that's for sure. But it simply isn't fair to accuse our process of failing to be sufficiently public when the real 'problem' is that we didn't wait around for everyone to show up before moving forward. :-)
We are forced to write the deletion notice. Basically, you are forcing us, and the other wikipedians, to use deletion notices.
No, I'm not. I don't even know what you mean by that. That isn't policy, and to my knowledge, it has never been policy.
On 16:13, 15 Jul 2003, Bdesham raised this issue first, using the language of "please place a notice" -- notice it was never stated as a requirement. That notice survived intact until just recently, when someone else clarified it by pointing out that not everyone agrees and that it's optional.
I fail to see how this amounts to anyone forcing anyone to do anything.
--Jimbo
Ugh. I hate replying at the top, by Yahoo won't let me reply in the body of the below message without leaving ">" marks as if my comments are part of the original message.
Anyway, what I wanted to say was, that, Jimbo, you apparently don't know that mav is going around to people's Talk pages and telling them that if they don't include the *mandated* text in the articles that they list on the Votes for Deletion page, then the items they put on the VfD page will be deleted off the VfD page.
If this isn't forcing people to do something, what is it?
RickK
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote: Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
The system right now may have been good in your opinion, but it was developed without input or notice of many wikipedians.
That's simply not true.
Maybe some had little input; maybe it was developed a year or two ago when many of us hadn't joined wikipedia. But either way, some wikipedians oppose the system, so it must be reconsidered
Well, everything can be reconsidered, that's for sure. But it simply isn't fair to accuse our process of failing to be sufficiently public when the real 'problem' is that we didn't wait around for everyone to show up before moving forward. :-)
We are forced to write the deletion notice. Basically, you are forcing us, and the other wikipedians, to use deletion notices.
No, I'm not. I don't even know what you mean by that. That isn't policy, and to my knowledge, it has never been policy.
On 16:13, 15 Jul 2003, Bdesham raised this issue first, using the language of "please place a notice" -- notice it was never stated as a requirement. That notice survived intact until just recently, when someone else clarified it by pointing out that not everyone agrees and that it's optional.
I fail to see how this amounts to anyone forcing anyone to do anything.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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--- Rick giantsrick13@yahoo.com wrote:
Ugh. I hate replying at the top, by Yahoo won't let me reply in the body of the below message without leaving ">" marks as if my comments are part of the original message.
Anyway, what I wanted to say was, that, Jimbo, you apparently don't know that mav is going around to people's Talk pages and telling them that if they don't include the *mandated* text in the articles that they list on the Votes for Deletion page, then the items they put on the VfD page will be deleted off the VfD page.
If this isn't forcing people to do something, what is it?
RickK
Not just that, but wouldn't it just be easier to put the text there yourself, mav? LDan
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Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
I don't agree with either of these sentences. I don't see any way for our policy development process to be any more open to input from the community. I can't think of a less secretive or more noisy way to organize anything. There are no back rooms here -- everything is done in public, with wide advertising throughout the system of how it's done. We're always open to suggestions, of course, but I think the system right now is a model of public accountability.
The system right now may have been good in your opinion, but it was developed without input or notice of many wikipedians. Maybe some had little input; maybe it was developed a year or two ago when many of us hadn't joined wikipedia. But either way, some wikipedians oppose the system, so it must be reconsidered
Excellent point! LDan wasn't there in 1787. ;-)
On Wednesday 20 August 2003 05:07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
I don't agree with either of these sentences.
No, I'm sure you don't -- they are not there for anyone to agree with, they are there to attempt to make my point.
I don't see any way for our policy development process to be any more open to input from the community. I can't think of a less secretive or more noisy way to organize anything. There are no back rooms here -- everything is done in public, with wide advertising throughout the system of how it's done. We're always open to suggestions, of course, but I think the system right now is a model of public accountability.
Except mav suddenly seems to think that a unilateral policy change without any discussion or even notice is OK. I don't remember that little detail being advertised anywhere in the system.
The second sentence bewilders me completely. What do your scare quotes around 'policy' mean?
They mean I'm assuming mav doesn't realize the full implications of what he's arguing for.
What do you mean by 'forcing openness'? Somehow our openness is *imposed* on the world?
I'm unsurprised that this confused you, it wasn't the best way to put it. But it's being forced upon those that should have had a say in the policy and did not.
And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook. The very foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate hierarchies of control.
The hierarchy that appears to have fallen into place unplanned is not elaborate at all. It has two levels: Admins - Others.
An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a good one.
One wonders what would have happened if *I* had made a unilateral policy change.
None of this argument makes any sense to me, because there has been no policy change, unilateral or otherwise. I just reviewed the entire history of the phrase in question, going back to when it was on the VfD page, and tracking it through every iteration. I recommend the same to Nicholas.
Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
I wrote:
I don't agree with either of these sentences.
Nicholas Knight responded:
No, I'm sure you don't -- they are not there for anyone to agree with, they are there to attempt to make my point.
I'm not sure what you mean. Perhaps I should be more clear: I don't agree with either of these sentences, because they are false. Do false sentences help to make your point? Or, if true, can you please expand or defend them?
Except mav suddenly seems to think that a unilateral policy change without any discussion or even notice is OK. I don't remember that little detail being advertised anywhere in the system.
Disregarding for a moment what "Mav suddenly seems to think" (becuase I think you're misunderstanding him), it's nonetheless not Mav's unilateral thoughts that determine what policy is, as I'm sure he'll be the first to agree.
It's misleading to elevate your disagreement with Mav about what policy should be into a broad and false claim that he's making policy unilaterally, or that policy is made "in back rooms with no input from the community".
What do you mean by 'forcing openness'? Somehow our openness is *imposed* on the world?
I'm unsurprised that this confused you, it wasn't the best way to put it. But it's being forced upon those that should have had a say in the policy and did not.
WHAT is being forced on anyone? Are we reading the same web pages? There is absolutely nothing required, not in the current version, and not in the previous version. No one has ever been required to post a notice, and there was nothing in the written policy that ever said that this was a requirement. Period.
So acting like you're being forced to do something is silly. The passage in question has always said "please", a request, not a command. No one has even gotten in trouble for not doing it.
An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a good one.
There has been no policy change at all. Not unilateral, not by consensus. Someone writing "please" on a web page does not establish policy. It doesn't even _purport falsely_ to establish policy.
If someone had written, out of the blue: "You are required to post a notice" -- yeah, that would be wrong. But writing "Please post a notice" does not imply policy, and *note well*, you can edit that page just as well as anyone else.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote in part:
None of this argument makes any sense to me, because there has been no policy change, unilateral or otherwise. I just reviewed the entire history of the phrase in question, going back to when it was on the VfD page, and tracking it through every iteration. I recommend the same to Nicholas.
*Every* iteration? Even this one by mav?: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&... That's not a request!
Nicholas Knight wrote:
Except mav suddenly seems to think that a unilateral policy change without any discussion or even notice is OK. I don't remember that little detail being advertised anywhere in the system.
Disregarding for a moment what "Mav suddenly seems to think" (because I think you're misunderstanding him), it's nonetheless not Mav's unilateral thoughts that determine what policy is, as I'm sure he'll be the first to agree.
Indeed he would, which is why it strikes me as especially odd in this case that mav was seeming to impose such a dramatic change like this. He explains that it's not dramatic -- just an extension of our long-standing policies of openness -- and that's a good argument. But it's a good argument for /instituting/ the dramatic change, not for claiming that it isn't dramatic in the first place. I remember mav's getting upset at The Cunctator for doing similar things, and Cunc would also explain that his change was just clarifying wiki nature.
It's misleading to elevate your disagreement with Mav about what policy should be into a broad and false claim that he's making policy unilaterally, or that policy is made "in back rooms with no input from the community".
I think that the point that Nicholas was trying to make is that /if/ mav's edit (cited above) were accepted as OK, /then/ en.Wikipedia would be making policy with no input. But mav's edit has been challenged and doesn't stand, so we're not actually in this position. You (and I) know that we don't in fact work this way, but a relatively new person might reasonably fear that mav's edit might end up being accepted as OK.
WHAT is being forced on anyone? Are we reading the same web pages? There is absolutely nothing required, not in the current version, and not in the previous version. No one has ever been required to post a notice, and there was nothing in the written policy that ever said that this was a requirement. Period.
You probably aren't reading the same web pages; you in particular don't seem to have read the one cited above: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&...
So acting like you're being forced to do something is silly. The passage in question has always said "please", a request, not a command. No one has even gotten in trouble for not doing it.
There've been reports of mav's placing warnings on user talk pages. (I haven't confirmed myself that these exist as reported.) To be sure, this is hardly getting anybody in trouble. But to a new user, that may not be so clear -- it helps to clarify.
There has been no policy change at all. Not unilateral, not by consensus. Someone writing "please" on a web page does not establish policy. It doesn't even _purport falsely_ to establish policy.
It seems to me that no policy change has successfully gone through. It does look to me like one was attempted, however. (To be sure, article history can be confusing sometimes, so perhaps clarification of the diff that I cited would be in order.)
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
*Every* iteration? Even this one by mav?: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&... That's not a request!
I overlooked that one! Well, Mav should not have written it that way.
Indeed he would, which is why it strikes me as especially odd in this case that mav was seeming to impose such a dramatic change like this. He explains that it's not dramatic -- just an extension of our long-standing policies of openness -- and that's a good argument.
Sure, and it's a good reason to have it as a soft guideline, i.e. 'please do this'.
I think that the point that Nicholas was trying to make is that /if/ mav's edit (cited above) were accepted as OK, /then/ en.Wikipedia would be making policy with no input. But mav's edit has been challenged and doesn't stand, so we're not actually in this position. You (and I) know that we don't in fact work this way, but a relatively new person might reasonably fear that mav's edit might end up being accepted as OK.
I think that's a fair assessment all around.
You probably aren't reading the same web pages; you in particular don't seem to have read the one cited above: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&...
That's right, I overlooked that one. All the versions I looked at (which was plenty, I thought!) didn't say that people MUST do anything.
If I can get philosophical for a moment, the only MUST we have around here is that people can't do things that would get them banned. But you have to really work to get yourself banned. Courteously failing to follow some guideline like this doesn't rise to that level.
To be sure, this is hardly getting anybody in trouble. But to a new user, that may not be so clear -- it helps to clarify.
That's right.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:There has been no policy change at all. Not unilateral, not by consensus. Someone writing "please" on a web page does not establish policy. It doesn't even _purport falsely_ to establish policy.
If someone had written, out of the blue: "You are required to post a notice" -- yeah, that would be wrong. But writing "Please post a notice" does not imply policy, and *note well*, you can edit that page just as well as anyone else.
--Jimbo
Jimbo, you haven't been following the history properly. All of a sudden, on August 17th, mav wrote this on my Talk page:
"When you list a page on Votes for deletion you must say "Listed on Votes for deletion" on the page you are listing. Otherwise the page will not get deleted.--mav 00:59, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC) "
Note the emphasis on "must". This was the first I had heard of it. It was never discussed on the mailing list, it doesn't seem to have had any discussion anywhere. It just suddenly appeared. And when I questioned it, I was told "It's policy", and if I didn't toe the line, I could lump it.
This is not "please", this is an order. I was ordered to do as Mav said, based on what someone without comment had put on the Votes for Deletion and Deletion policy pages. And I had no input into the process.
RickK
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At 09:35 AM 8/20/03 -0700, Nicholas Wright wrote:
On Wednesday 20 August 2003 05:07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook. The very foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate hierarchies of control.
The hierarchy that appears to have fallen into place unplanned is not elaborate at all. It has two levels: Admins - Others.
An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a good one.
It would be a hierarchy if people were arguing "He's an admin, and did this, so we have to accept it" or even "you're not an admin, you don't get to have an opinion."
What's actually happening--as you state--is that people *agree with* what was done, and are saying so. What are you suggesting instead? Must we not state our positions because we're sysops?
One wonders what would have happened if *I* had made a unilateral policy change. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I'm an admin, and I wasn't given any say in the matter. I was told by mav, out of the blue, that I MUST do what the policy says, or my inputs on the VfD page will be deleted. Not the articles I put on the page, but my comments on the VfD page themselves. I still have not seen any discussion as the WHY this policy was UNILATERALLY established.
RickK
Vicki Rosenzweig vr@redbird.org wrote: At 09:35 AM 8/20/03 -0700, Nicholas Wright wrote:
On Wednesday 20 August 2003 05:07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
And finally, I certainly don't agree with the notion of 'unwashed masses' -- that attitude has no place within my outlook. The very foundation of our wiki philosophy is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, so that there's no need for elaborate hierarchies of control.
The hierarchy that appears to have fallen into place unplanned is not elaborate at all. It has two levels: Admins - Others.
An admin made a unilateral policy change, and it's being essentially ignored or defended by other admins on the grounds that they think the policy is a good one.
It would be a hierarchy if people were arguing "He's an admin, and did this, so we have to accept it" or even "you're not an admin, you don't get to have an opinion."
What's actually happening--as you state--is that people *agree with* what was done, and are saying so. What are you suggesting instead? Must we not state our positions because we're sysops?
One wonders what would have happened if *I* had made a unilateral policy change.
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--- Rick giantsrick13@yahoo.com wrote:
I'm an admin, and I wasn't given any say in the matter. I was told by mav, out of the blue, that I MUST do what the policy says, or my inputs on the VfD page will be deleted. Not the articles I put on the page, but my comments on the VfD page themselves. I still have not seen any discussion as the WHY this policy was UNILATERALLY established.
RickK
What Mav is doing, IMO, is the most, I hate to use the term, unwiki thing so far. It doesn't make sense to delete something perfectly helpful just because superficial procedures. Superficial procedures are the antithesis of a wiki. Hell, we even let anyone edit an aritcle! LDan
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<rant>
Why in the heck is this thread still going on?
Have people lost all common sense and decency? You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Deletion of pages through the "delete page" function as we have it currently *is* unwiki, because only a relatively small number of people can do it, and only a relatively small number of people can undo it. As long as that state of affairs exists (VOLUNTEERS TO RECODE THE DELETION SYSTEM ARE WELCOME) it is only polite to make reasonable efforts to notify people[1] that pages are under consideration for deletion by putting a note *on* the page in question.
[1] The 'original author' is not the only person who needs to be notified. People stumbling upon the article by accident who may be interested in fixing or expanding it would certainly be interested to discover that someone was planning to disappear it.
Now remember, just because mav says you "must" do something doesn't mean you'll be arrested, jailed, tortured, or banned for doing it. That's just his opinion on proper protocol.
And I think it's a fine one in this case.
</rant>
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
--- Brion Vibber vibber@aludra.usc.edu wrote:
<rant>
Why in the heck is this thread still going on?
Have people lost all common sense and decency? You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Deletion of pages through the "delete page" function as we have it currently *is* unwiki, because only a relatively small number of people can do it, and only a relatively small number of people can undo it. As long as that state of affairs exists (VOLUNTEERS TO RECODE THE DELETION SYSTEM ARE WELCOME) it is only polite to make reasonable efforts to notify people[1] that pages are under consideration for deletion by putting a note *on* the page in question.
It would make sense to let anyone delete articles, but is all the history still available after an article is deleted and undeleted? And if we let anyone delete articles, I think a deleted article should have page history show up of all the past edits. Like you said, this would require a recoding of the deletion system, and I don't know PHP or /mySQL, so I couldn't do that. L
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Brion Vibber wrote:
Now remember, just because mav says you "must" do something doesn't mean you'll be arrested, jailed, tortured, or banned for doing it. That's just his opinion on proper protocol.
And I think it's a fine one in this case.
I agree. Sysops shouldn't say that people MUST do things, except of course that people MUST not be such a pain in the ass that they force me to have to ban them to restore the peace. :-)
--- Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently developed
in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes
directly
against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus and by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our best practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing down the best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be deleted, because doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten) polices of openness and transparency. Otherwise some authors may not know why their article was deleted. We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the potential avoidance of needless ill will.
For example, an article called [[Fumocy]] was recently listed on VfD without having a VfD notice placed on the article. A week passed and nobody spoke up for the article. I noticed that this apparently well-researched article was listed and I tried to confirm the title; I couldn't. I then tried to confirm some of the information on the page; I could. Apparently the author (a professional astronomer) and a few of his friends wrote the article using a brand new term for "full moon cycle" that is not yet (nor may never be) accepted by the scientific community.
Luckily instead of deleting the article I moved it to the author's userspace and then later found out all the details. The author, however, was a bit miffed that there wasn't /any/ notice left on the article that it was about to be deleted; if a notice had been there, then anybody who knew about the subject could have argued for keeping the article based on the content (although the title is wrong). If however, I deleted the article, the author would not have known why, and the readers likewise would have been denied the opportunity to defend the article. That is, unless they read every entry submited to the VfD page; but who has time or want to do that?
IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with could have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it; if for no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not).
What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving some notice before he made what some view as a unilateral policy change? Or would that have been
too
inconvenient, since people might disagree?
And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed on VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might disagree? Two way street.
That's why I think we should just write the userpage of the article. Usually, the articles at VfD only have one author, if not the other authors only did formatting edits (even if they didn't mark them as minor). If you wrote a message to the author at the beginning, it probably would have been solved faster than writing it on the article. I think no well-written non-copyvio article should be deleted without contacting its main author, regardless of whether a notice is placed on the article or not. LDan
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On Wednesday 20 August 2003 02:00, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.
No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus and by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our best practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing down the best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be deleted, because doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten) polices of openness and transparency. Otherwise some authors may not know why their article was deleted.
Documenting best practice is not the same as documenting policy. When a programmer writes code, best practice is to comment that code, but would we really want compilers enforcing it as policy?
We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the potential avoidance of needless ill will.
Transferring the load merely transfers the ill will.
<snip story about a nearly-lost article>
This should provide more incentive to automate the process, no?
IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with could have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it; if for no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not).
"A bit more" ? There doesn't seem to have been *any* notice.
What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving some notice before he made what some view as a unilateral policy change? Or would that have been too inconvenient, since people might disagree?
And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed on VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might disagree? Two way street.
That is precisely my point. If other people are expected to conform to a policy of openness that requires extra work, that policy should be set in an open way. This one was not.
Nicholas Knight wrote:
That is precisely my point. If other people are expected to conform to a policy of openness that requires extra work, that policy should be set in an open way. This one was not.
Just so people understand what is being discussed, it's these lines: :When you list a page on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion that you think :will be listed for the entire 7 days -- i.e., a page that won't be :deleted immediately -- please place the following notice above the :page's content:
I don't read that as requiring anything. It's a request, not a requirement, not an expectation.
It would be wrong of someone to add something like this if they wrote "When you list a page... you are required to place the following notice". It would even be wrong to write it in a command form, as in "When you list a page... -- place the following notice."
But writing on an open, community edited web page, something that says "please do such-and-such" is not setting policy unilaterally, because it isn't even setting policy at all.
If you don't like how it is worded -- change it! Work co-operatively with people to establish best practices all around, including the best wording of helpful hints of what a page is supposed to be about.
I'm about done with this, because it seems there's not much really _here_, as far as disputes go. There's no requirement being forced on anyone, and the current version of the page even goes so far as to make that 100% clear: "Some Wikipedians object to this rule. As such, it is considered optional, but someone else may add the notice if you choose not to."
Is there anything about the current version that's upsetting to you? Then edit it!
But please (and notice, this is a request, not a command! ;-)) don't go around saying that someone is unilaterally making policy, or that Wikipedia policies are set in back rooms, or similar nonsense.
--Jimbo
It wasn't originally please. It was I *must* do it, or my inputs to VfD would be deleted. This was a mandate. It's only been changed to "please" since I, and then others, complained. Although mav seems highly upset that I complained, even getting angry that I actually had the temerity to bring the matter to the mailing list.
RickK
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
That is precisely my point. If other people are expected to conform to a policy of openness that requires extra work, that policy should be set in an open way. This one was not.
Just so people understand what is being discussed, it's these lines: :When you list a page on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion that you think :will be listed for the entire 7 days -- i.e., a page that won't be :deleted immediately -- please place the following notice above the :page's content:
I don't read that as requiring anything. It's a request, not a requirement, not an expectation.
It would be wrong of someone to add something like this if they wrote "When you list a page... you are required to place the following notice". It would even be wrong to write it in a command form, as in "When you list a page... -- place the following notice."
But writing on an open, community edited web page, something that says "please do such-and-such" is not setting policy unilaterally, because it isn't even setting policy at all.
If you don't like how it is worded -- change it! Work co-operatively with people to establish best practices all around, including the best wording of helpful hints of what a page is supposed to be about.
I'm about done with this, because it seems there's not much really _here_, as far as disputes go. There's no requirement being forced on anyone, and the current version of the page even goes so far as to make that 100% clear: "Some Wikipedians object to this rule. As such, it is considered optional, but someone else may add the notice if you choose not to."
Is there anything about the current version that's upsetting to you? Then edit it!
But please (and notice, this is a request, not a command! ;-)) don't go around saying that someone is unilaterally making policy, or that Wikipedia policies are set in back rooms, or similar nonsense.
--Jimbo
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