On Sat, 2002-09-28 at 15:24, Jeroen Heijmans wrote:
Cunctator wrote:
First, those choices are not the only ones; second, your reasoning with #2 is flawed. Your other choices:
- You can simply ignore the policy, as you have done in practice.
Why have a policy in the first place, then?
I didn't say that was a good option. But let me ask you; why do you ignore the explicit policy?
- You can express your disagreement on the Talk page or on meta or on
your user page or on the mailing list.
I thought your point was that everybody should just be editing the policy if they disagreed ("policy is decided by editing the policy pages"), so then this would not be an option.
No. Direct editing should be the first choice; not the only choice. And you're confusing two different threads here; I was adding to Engels' list, not delineating my own conception.
The flawed reasoning with #2 is simply that changes to a page do not an edit war necessarily make. If that were so, then Wikipedia wouldn't work. A quote from the FAQ: "We assume that the world is full of reasonable people and that collectively they can arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion, despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers. It's called optimism."
There's a big difference between Wikipedia articles and policy pages. The articles are about things that we do not have control of. We may have opinions about them, but it's been agreed that we try to present these opinions neutrally. However, we DO have control over the Wikipedia policies, and our own opinions DO count. Even if I'm reasonable, my opinion on many issue may be completely different with that of other Wikipedians (it frequently is), but there is no NPOV to "neutralise" our policies. The only way to change or formulate policy is by discussing it first. The policy pages are meant for Wikipedians to use as a reference. If I'd just go and change it to my personal opinion, that gives a wrong picture (unless that personal opinions happens to be the de facto policy) and things could get really messed up.
There is an equivalent to the NPOV, and that is consensus. Your belief that changing policy to your personal opinion would automatically mess things up is based on flawed reasoning.