On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Jonathan Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > On this particular point, I think some of the resistance to having > "Policies" of this nature is that where you have Laws, you get Lawyers whose > job it is to find ways of breaking the spirit of those policies without > breaking the letter of the (or equally *apply* the letter of those policies > while breaking the spirit).
Yes, with any culture change, you get new social dynamics that emerge. > Wikipedia hasn't managed to avoid problems by > having policies, and I don't think we'd have a much easier time if we > started writing things in stone. I have to disagree with you on that one. Wikipedia is huge, with many thousands of highly active participants. The numerous policies, carefully worked out with hundreds of iterations, are exactly what make that possible. Remember the problems with vandalism or unfair editing of biographies of living people a few years ago? Remember how that problem seems to have gone away? That's policy, and lots of hard work behind it. You know how crappy articles about insignificant companies are pretty rare? Policy. And I could go on. > Discussion and consensus (and maybe even sanctions against those who refuse > to act according to that consensus) are more important than hard-and-fast > rules. Discussion -> consensus -> policy -> improved quality. There's not much point establishing consensus if you don't write it down. Because then the next users don't know it, and even the people in the discussion don't remember it a few months from now. We constantly debate things on the tagging list that never get documented, and it's essentially a wasted effort. Steve _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
