[WikiEN-l] Process is evil

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/21/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/21/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > (Whatever happened to my project to give the policy/guidelines
> > collection a much-needed enema this year ...)
>
> I think we should schedule 6 monthly enemas. Every policy should be
> rewritten from scratch every 6 months, only incorporating the
> absolutely most critical and still relevant sections from the
> preceding version.

The policy pages I watch are fairly cruft immune.. because they are
mostly meta policies, doctrine not process....

But there are certainly a lot of policies which do get crufted... but
suggesting we nuke them ignores one of the primary causes of the
crufting:  They get crufted because there either isn't anyone with an
interest in stopping it, or some malfunction in our community is
allowing the one-rule-per-mistake-made crowd to have editorial control
of the page.

Simply nuking the pages from orbit would not solve this....  and it
would quickly drive the folks who've worked so carefully on our more
balanced non-crufted policies totally insane as new users decide they
can (ab)use that policy to rewrite our policies in their own image.