[WikiEN-l] WP:V, WP:RS, WP:NOR and WP:ATT

[Jeff Raymond]

Slim Virgin wrote:

> Okay, but this leaves us with a real problem. We're not psychic, so we
> can't know who supports a policy or who objects unless they say
> something about it. Hundreds of editors contributed to the debate
> about ATT -- it wasn't a secret! -- and almost all (in fact, my
> recollection is all) were supportive of the merge, though people had
> different ideas about the details. But the merge of three untidy pages
> into one page was completely supported. We had exactly the same broad
> consensus that we had for BLP.

But there's the problem - such a fundamental change, one could attest,
WASN'T known.  I wasn't under a rock for the five months that this was
discussed, and I had WP:V and WP:RS on my watchlist, yet I had no clue. 
How does that happen, exactly?

We keep harkening back to BLP, which was really kind of rushed and kind of
blindsided a lot of people.  My hopes that we've learned from that are
erased since a) we seem to be doing it again, and b) there's an
implication that it has wide support, which I functionally dispute because
I feel a lot of the support comes from the "Well, Jimbo wanted it camp."
It's there, we're using it, and I've simply removed myself from most
living bios to not deal with the bullshit it's created, but we have to be
very, very careful of what we call "wide support" when there's a good
chance that people simply don't know about it.  When highly active editors
are surprised to see something happen, there's a problem with how the
consensus was gathered.

-Jeff