Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130325173913/@comment-1046-20130417031933

CzechOut wrote: And policy does not emerge simply from a head count. Could you assemble a majority of users to overturn, I dunno, T:HONOR? Probably. There are obviously a lot of people who see it as weird to type "Dr" instead of "Dr." There are any number of arbitrary policies that could go the other way, and so you could get a majority in a thread to vote for change. And then comes the important question: who is going to enact this policy change? And the motion is suddenly, quietly tabled.

Policy on a wiki must above all else be practicable, which the change to T:VS caused by allowing in Vienna would not be. Allowing in Vienna would render T:VS, rule 4, moot.

Really, it wouldn't. Unless you are using a version of rule 4 which doesn't include the word "probably" and the clause "but a community discussion will likely be needed to make a final determination".

I'm not suggesting that policy derives from a head count. I'm suggesting that the interpretation of policy, and how it applies in a particular case, is subject to review by the community. And if the community says, "in this case, we disagree with your judgment", we (and I include myself in this) need to go along with the community — even if we think that judgment is incorrect.

It's akin to a police officer who makes an arrest. He or she does so in good faith, believing that the person arrested is guilty of the crime (or at least that a legitimate case can be brought). But what if a jury of the accused's peers say the accused is innocent? That doesn't mean that the police officer was in the wrong, or that the law which the police officer thought was being broken is now invalid. It just means that in this one case, the community (jury) disagrees with the police officer's interpretation of the law.

Guys, I've never seen a better case for a rule 4 exclusion. Again, that's why this thread was originally an announcement. I have often brought such matters before the community in a more solicitous way, inviting discussions that lasted for days. So it is not that I "tried to pull a fast one", as was indicated above or am "anti-community" as Josiah has I'm sure only unintentionally implied. It is that, after having participated in a ton of these debates over the years, I cannot imagine a dismissal that will ever be clearer.

If there were a poster child for Rule 4, this would be it.

So if this is allowed in, the policy wholly fails. Everything excluded under a rule 4 debate would have to be reviewed. And one little story isn't worth that.

It really doesn't break the policy, because rule 4 already says that a community discussion will probably be necessary. In fact, what does go against rule 4 is the suggestion that if one admin believes that a work is excluded, it can be deleted without discussion.

Yes, I did not mean to say that CzechOut is anti-community in general. In fact, he's done an extraordinary amount of work codifying past community discussions into policy, and in so doing has on more than one occasion recorded policies with which he personally disagrees (or which he would prefer were stronger or weaker, etc.). All I'm saying is that in this case what seems sky-is-blue obvious to CzechOut is apparently not that obvious to the rest of the community, and he seems to be having trouble accepting that.

The one thing we all agree on is that the language provided does allow us to exclude the story. You might think there's wiggle room to accept the story. But everyone seems to grant, however grudgingly, that the language does present the opportunity to dismiss.

So that's where the consensus is, it seems to me. I think we can all agree on the notion that Richardson and Spragg have cast doubt on whether this is a part of the normal DWU and whether it is a genuine spin-off of Doctor Who.

And, look, if someone in this thread has a love for Vienna that burns white hot, we can always create w:c:vienna. The URL is available. I'll help you provide prominent links and even give you whatever templates you want to set up over there. Excluding Vienna from this wiki does not mean, as Josiah claimed, the destruction of information. It just means, at most, the repackaging of it elsewhere — an "elsewhere" that can be fully linked here. We could put the Vienna Wiki in exactly the same sort of "locked off little side-universe" that Spragg enjoins us to put the audios.

See, to me that looks like needless work, when the option of simply including this audio in our wiki — an option which I still maintain that Spragg's note allows us — is available. But I agree that having a side-wiki with information from this story is preferable to having the information simply deleted and/or not accessible from here.