[WikiEN-l] Policy adoption

[Steve Summit]

Ec wrote:
> The entire policy adoption process is remarkably fucked up. It favours 
> the policy wonks with private agendas who have the time and tenacity
> to ensure that their favorite views will prevail.  The corpus of our 
> policies (including guidlines and other pseudo policies) is so huge
> that it becomes easy for anyone to plant a policy virus whose infective
> nature will not be noticed until much later.  At that point the 
> supporters of a change can offer nothing but a glib response to the 
> effect that you should have said something about it earlier...

Ayup.  And that's pretty much inevitable, given the way anyone
can edit anything.  (On Wikipedia, just as someone observed about
the the Internet at large, the lunatics aren't just running the
asylum, they designed and built it...)

It's easy to imagine one remedy, though.  We already claim that
we're a pretty fluid, evolving place.  So when a policy is found
not to be working, or otherwise comes up for review, and there's
a move afoot to change it, we should work harder at reminding
ourselves that "because we've had it for a while" is *not*
anything like a sufficient reason for blindly keeping that way.
If we've got a policy that has come into question, and if there's
no rationale written down for it and no record of the alleged
consensus that originally fostered it, then we should feel free
to start with a blank slate, to draft a new policy based on
today's needs and emerging consensus, without being unduly bound
by "tradition".

(I'm not saying to always throw out tradition, of course -- if
a tradition is good and still enjoys consensus, then of course we
can keep it.)

> ...that it has been here so long it can only be changed if a
> consensus to change is first achieved.

That's a real problem, too, of course, because it can be
stupefyingly difficult to achieve consensus on these contentious
policy issues.

Part of the problem is that people get really stubbornly entrenched.
I think we need to work harder at remembering that the spirit of
compromise that's inherent in NPOV applies (or ought to apply) in
project space as well as article space.  It seems to me that, too
often, the same editors and admins who will scold the fractious
editors of a controversial article, insisting that they set their
personal agendas aside and find a middle ground, will turn around
and stonewall each other just as fractiously when they get involved
in a policy debate.