On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Charles Matthews < [email protected]> 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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
