People don't read they react.
Here is a real-life example. I asked a German mate of mine why he had opposed the policy, with the following oppose rationale:
"Oppose No need to go beyond existing legal obligations, just follow the laws that apply." (Oppose 114)
When I asked him in which way he thought the policy went beyond obscenity and privacy law, his reply was that he hadn't bothered to read it:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer_Diskussion:Fossa&acti...
"I have no idea what's in the policy, but the most liberal policy feasible is a policy that adheres to the laws that apply. If, say, the servers are located in Guinea, they should adhere to Guniean law, if they are located in Tulsa, US/Oklahoma law applies. No need for redundancies here."
What the policy tried to do was make editors aware of existing laws, incl. privacy, because at the moment, if you nominate a blow-job or similar picture imported a few weeks ago from a "no longer active" Flickr account, it is as likely as not that three people will turn up for the deletion discussion.
One says, "You can't see all of her face." Another says, "It's in use in a project, so we can't delete it". Another says the nominator is a prude, and a fourth says, "It has educational value."
As Scott said, it's a chat-show phone-in.
Andreas
--- On Sat, 11/12/10, ???? wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
From: ???? wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Saturday, 11 December, 2010, 8:57 On 10/12/2010 20:37, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 12/10/2010 12:08:37 PM Pacific
Standard Time,
jayen466@yahoo.com
writes:
Suggest you read the draft policy, rather than the
votes.
You're suggesting that all the no votes are simply
trolls then?
That's a lot of no votes to just cast them off as
people who didn't read
the draft, isn't it?
People don't read they react. In the UK a couple of years ago there was a petition that gathered 50,000 signatures against a proposal to ban all photography in public spaces. As a point of fact there was no such proposal.
This received over 10,000 responses and a huge number of point ny point rebuttals despite the fact that it is obviously a joke based around the Brady Bunch. http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html
As the respondents to the above were pretty much the same constituents as wikipedians (young, male, technically savvy) why would any one think that exactly the same thing isn't going on with those currently voting?