[WikiEN-l] New way to discourage newcomers invented

[Ryan Delaney]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Ryan Delaney wrote:
> >
> > That's the point made in the OP. Apoc2400 thinks that, since the
> > reality is that Wikipedia has become greatly bureaucratized (he and I
> > think that's a bad thing, you think it's a good thing, but that's
> > beside the point) then we should stop kidding ourselves and get rid of
> > WP:BURO.
> No, I do not think it is a "good thing" - where did I say that? I think
> it is important not to be confused between discussions of what is really
> going on, within Wikipedia as it actually operates, and discussions at
> an idealised level (normally only backed up with some anecdotal if
> slight evidence). The other point I would like to make is that the
> problem really comes with people who think you make a bureaucracy work
> by being bureaucratic, when the opposite is true. WP:BURO is basically
> prescriptive, not descriptive (I'm against people who weasel by saying
> policy is basically descriptive not prescriptive whenever that suits
> them), and it tells us not to do that bureaucratic thing of using
> sensible procedural features in an obstructive fashion.
>
> Charles
>
>
It sounds to me like you're both making a similar point: that is, there's no
reason to deny the reality that Wikipedia does have some bureaucratic
elements. In the worst case, this leads to a rather Kafkaesque situation
where people who are actually obstructed by bureaucracy being told by a
bureaucrat that "Well, as you can see from our policies, this is not a
bureaucracy." In this case it helps to have 20/20 vision about the fact that
Wikipedia is, in fact, bureaucratic, because recognizing the problem is half
of solving it.

If this is your view, then you probably would agree with a less polemical
version of what I took the OP to be saying: Wikipedia *is* bureaucratic, and
we ought to be honest about that.

- causa sui