On 6/5/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Sun, 4 Jun 2006 16:12:18 -0700, you wrote:
My objection in short: "Fuck process" is, here and now, more of a problem for Wikipedia than any of the individual wrongs Tony has righted using
that
justification, of late. Playing well with others is more important now.
Up to a point, I'd say. As far as I can tell Tony's beef with "process wonks" is that the slavish following of rules has come to replace building a great encyclopaedia as the primary goal. He has no patience with people who look first at the rules and only second at whether a given thing is good for the encyclopaedia or not. The decision hierarchy at present for many people seems to be community, guideline, policy, encyclopaedia - it should be the other way round.
Ok. So apply your preferred order to the signatures refactoring.
Encyclopedia: not affected. People's signatures are talk space / user space / admin space functions. Policy: weak policy on signature contents. Some that Tony zapped exceeded policy recommendations; some were within. Guideline: which one do you want to apply? Assume good faith? Be bold? The vaguer parts of the signature Policy? Community: Community subset gets upset. Community subset RfC's him.
If this had been some sort of issue with users dropping crap in mainspace articles, we wouldn't be here. We're here because it was not an issue affecting the Encyclopedia aspect of Wikipedia, where Tony exceeded the written Policy, With fuzzy Guideline applicability, and upset the Community.
Even if Community is your last priority, it has to be some priority. The signatures issue largely doesn't apply to the other levels.