[WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia Policy as sovereign law

[Thomas Dalton]

I am Person A, so I will attempt to clarify what I was saying.
Basically, there is a difference between "This is what we should do"
and "This is how we should do it". We have policies on what kind of
content is acceptable (WP:V, WP:NPOV, etc.) and then we have a
separate policy on how we deal with content that doesn't (and can't)
meet those criteria (WP:DELETE, probably - my knowledge of shortcuts
is failing me!). "We should not do harm" is a matter of content and
that should be kept separate to matters of procedure. Now, it's not
necessary for all policy to be written down. We have plenty of
unwritten rules, and not doing harm could be one of them, but it isn't
- we do plenty of harm. We've always felt that neutrality takes
precedence over not doing harm. We've recently changed that for
marginally notable living people, but not for fully notable ones. We
try to minimise harm (that's an unwritten rule based on common human
decency), but not at the expense of neutrality. If we're going to
change that, it needs to be carefully discussed, and that discussion
should be separate from the procedural one.