On Jan 25, 2007, at 6:13 PM, Steve Block wrote:
No and stop being stupid is sadly unworkable, because you get told not to be stupid back. And I don't see why we can't have an article on Moon Knight's throwing arrows if you throw WP:CITE and WP:RS out. I don't see why we can't have an article on anything then. You need to come up with something better than telling people not to be stupid.
Yes. But we have over and over again seen that policy can never cure stupidity. The stupid will break things with or without policy. And policy has usually been largely ineffectual in fixing the stupid. What fixes the stupid is having multiple people going "No, that's stupid" and reverting the changes. That's always been our main line of defense. And the thing is, it works just as well if there's a policy that says "revert the changes" as if there's not.
No Phil, I'm just aware that a lot of people currently attempting to edit Wikipedia are, to borrow your phrase, dithering idiots. I make no assertion that WP:RS is the source of common sense and judgement. It is simply somethin that can be pointed to. I'm already having issues over whether a fansite is a reliable source or not because RS doesn't mention fansites. There is an indication of what the problem will be if we do away with this. Look, I honestly don't care what the rules say, I'm hopeful I'm pragmatic to make the right call in different circumstances, but I see too many people who seem unable to work out how to best compromise. Good articles get deleted, bad articles get kept, people get tied up in process when they should be editing, Wikipedia has become a game.
And the best way to stop the idiotic Wikinomic is to take away the process. The main thing that process does is it makes it so that only process wonks get involved. Take away the process, take away the stupid junk.
WP:RS and WP:CITE are valuable. Remove WP:RS and WP:V loses half its meaning. What you are railing against is not two pages, but the cluelessness of many wikipedians. Sadly, we can't say that on Wikipedia because we have civility policies. The people who invest time gardening at the process pages or using them as deletion tools are the problem, not the people using them to create and improve articles.
Exactly. And the problem is that the people take the process pages and bite the newbies. Elsewhere in this thread I used the hypothetical example of Susan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ User:Phil_Sandifer/Susan
That's the question here. How can we take away the ability of the clueless to bite the newbies.
I suspect the easiest answer would be an arbcom with the balls to give a complete pass to a rogue admin who went and nuked about there dozen pages in a two minute time period, and to pass a finding "Admin's actions were completely right, and none of these pages should be recreated." Make the place hostile to the process junkies and get them to fork.
Actually, that would be a good policy page. [[Wikipedia:Bite the process junkies]]
-Phil