Amir Elisha Aharoni wrote:
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 21:09, Yoni Weiden yonidebest@gmail.com wrote:
The question is - shouldn't there be one set of standards for all Wikipedias?
I do think that there should be one set of standards for all languages. But it may be hard to enforce it on an existing community.
No, because we are not able to reach a concensus across all the language communities. Thus each project community should reach their own concensus. Personally I find this diversity also a very good thing because one can always get ideas from other projects, good ones to follow, bad ones to avoid or to change.
WMF can try and enforce copyright policy or maybe Biographies of Living People policy, because these issues may have severe legal implications, but it is next to impossible to enforce Notability or Verifiability policies.
correct. And in the example BLP the resolution of the board is purposefully so soft. It only urges the communities to notice the problem and to take care about it, it didn't say what each individual community must do, in respect of the autonomy of the projects.
Few he-wikipedians care about it, but he.wikipedia did quite well for several years without a clear written policy on any of the following: Living People, Notability, Original Research and Verifiability. All decisions on these matters are made ad hoc. To our friends from en.wikipedia it must seem surreal :)
No, this is the ideal state. Actually I don't like written rules. Rules are dead things and often they don't really fit to the actual situation. If one can discuss every case and reach a concensus without a fix rule this is for me the best case. But this only works in a relatively small community and doesn't fit a very big and diverse community.