On Sunday 08 September 2002 12:01 pm, you wrote:
I don't recall ever having a problem with people changing policies unilaterally, so I guess I don't see any good reason to have these pages frozen. I do, however, see some problems with it.
Stephen Gilbert
Yes there has been a problem with this in the past (albeit relatively minor - but that was back when we had 1/3 the edit volume). Off the top of my head; an anonymous IP tried to add a new naming convention unilaterally without discussion; http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Naming_conventions&...
24's additions to rules to consider (admittedly not a policy page but very similar); http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Rules_to_consider&...
And there are probably others that could be found by digging a bit more.
Then there is http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_L... which for legal reasons can't be edited by anybody and also http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
As Karen said anybody who has been around for a while can be a sysop and we can't have just any anonymous IP changing policy pages.
If you have noticed when I refactored the naming conventions page I spun-off the majority of the text in sub-articles which /are not/ protected - just watched by little old me. I think something similar should be done with NPOV which has become a monster. That way the amount of protected text is at a bare minimum and anybody can copyedit the majority of the text yet the short policy statements on the protected page are not changed.
In fact all of our policy pages should be as short as possible with separate but linked unprotected pages which go into in-depth discussion and explanation. See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions
We might want to have some type of boilerplate block at the top of each policy page stating something to the effect;
"[[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|Wikipedia policy]] has evolved over time and continues to evolve as the project matures. Policy changes must be agreed to by consensus however. If you want to help us refine our policies please add to this page's talk, join the [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia-L|mailing list]] and/or ask to become a [[Wikipedia:Administrators|Wikipedia administrator]] (which is granted to any logged-in user who is generally known and trusted by the community)."
It has been stated before that we can't trust any anonymous yahoo with meta functions (and changing policy is one of these functions).
PS I've heard several people chim in that "Ignore all rules" is a policy. That's plain wrong; it is just a rule to consider. See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)