[WikiEN-l] More Jimbo quotes on Tor

[Gwern Branwen]

On  0, Sean <sean at epoptic.com> scribbled:
> Anthony wrote:
> > That's ridiculous.  If the majority of people don't support this
> > supposed policy, then it's not a valid policy in the first place.
>
> Nice try.  But just in case you're slow instead of simply disingenuous,
> I'll explain.  The few people weighing in on AB's RFA do not represent
> the entire population of Wikipedia.  Just because one or two more people
> with fringe beliefs collect at one brief moment doesn't obliterate
> popular and long standing policy.
>
> --
>   Sean Barrett     | Of course I've gone mad with power! Have you

Oh, come on. Like the entire population, or even a representative subset has so much as heard of NOP, much less considered the details and assented to it? All you're doing is opposing your favored small collection of WP editors with fringe beliefs against someone else's favored collection of WP editors with fringe beliefs. WP long ago passed the point where it was meaningful to say that a policy had consensus among the editor population in general.

All we can do is hope for consensus among policy's equivalent of subject-area editors, viz. the people affected. (As an example, WP:USURP is policy that most editors will have never heard of, never need to use, and never care about. But among those who meet any of the three, it seems to have consensus and so I'd rank it as good policy. Similarly for stuff like subject-specific MOSs).

In this case, while soft-blocking TOR nodes might not have consensus among affected editors, it seems pretty clear the de facto policy of hardblocking equally lacks support among people included in the three groups.

--
gwern
Dassault emc Fukuyama KG-84C Fiel NSCT WISDIM IFO CRA SL-1
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