On 9/28/02 7:42 AM, "Andre Engels" engels@uni-koblenz.de wrote:
This is how it's worked historically, and how it should work in the future. The alternative is entirely too hierarchical and bureaucratic.
Doing it your way would either lead to dictatorship of the most bold ones, or to edit wars.
That's as absurd as saying, Doing it your way would either lead to dictatorship of the most bold subscribed ones, or to flame wars.
Suppose I want A and you want B. You change the policy page. There are two possibilities:
- I decide to live with the policy even though I do not agree with it, and
you have single-sidedly decided the issue. Not fair. 2. I change it back, and perhaps someone else who is of yet another opinion changes it again. Thus, we get into an edit war. Not robust.
First, those choices are not the only ones; second, your reasoning with #2 is flawed. Your other choices:
3. You can simply ignore the policy, as you have done in practice. 4. You can express your disagreement on the Talk page or on meta or on your user page or on the mailing list.
The flawed reasoning with #2 is simply that changes to a page do not an edit war necessarily make. If that were so, then Wikipedia wouldn't work. A quote from the FAQ: "We assume that the world is full of reasonable people and that collectively they can arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion, despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers. It's called optimism."