[WikiEN-l] ArbCom about to declare that the MoS is policy

[James D. Forrester]

On Thursday, June 23, 2005 7:57 PM, Jon <thagudearbh at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

[Snip whether the MoS is policy]

> SlimVirgin, supported by others, argued that it would need a
> consensus vote.

I truely hope that this is not in fact what SlimVirgin and the others meant,
as, if so, it shows a distressingly great misunderstanding of what policy
is; the result of votes it is not. A few examples at random would be No
Personal Attacks, No Original Research, the Deletion Policy, the Sockpuppet
policy, amongst others. Oh, and this little one called "NPOV". None of these
started as consensus polls, nor were not considered 'policy' until they had
managed to muster such support.

And, BTW, you probably meant "consensus poll"; votes are binding, and we
just don't /do/ binding polls, a.k.a. votes, on Wikipedia (even in the case
of the selection of members of the Arbitration Committee, it is, in the end,
just appointment by Jimbo as he sees fit, whether guided by the results of
the poll of users or not).

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
E-Mail    : james at jdforrester.org
IM  (MSN) : jamesdforrester at hotmail.com