Poetlister wrote:Meepsheep wrote:I think it's fairly obvious the system is set up in favor of administrative totalitarianism, otherwise there wouldn't be A. contradicting policies, and B. loosely defined policies.
I suspect that to a large extent that's cock-up rather than conspiracy. There is no central guiding mind on the policies; each of them is crowdsourced, often by different people. In such an environment, contradictions are inevitable, and sloppy drafting highly likely.
Yeah, I agree with Poetlister mainly, and of course Meepsheep opined on how the system is set up at this time, and not necessarily how it came to be so set up.
My sense, though I'd have to go do some big study to actually back this up, is that Wikipedia policies at their cores usually make sense, and probably did at their initial draft and early revisions, but that after that things were accreted on to them over time where to the point where they often are bloated, contradictory, messes. My sense is, and some of you will hear me sounding a typical refrain of mine in a different modulation, is that policy authors are typically content creators, but the policies are later and over years co-opted and mutated by administrative participants.
I'll caveat that that, yes, a few administrative participants also create significant content, and there is the rare content creator who also significantly administrates or even possibly ends up at Arbcom, and no-one is, necessarily, a bad or lesser person, but I find the administrative participant-content creator divide the distinguishing and pervasive fundamental of how Wikipedia today functions.