Tardis:You are bound by current policy
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No personal attacks → Discussion policy → Do not disrupt this wiki to prove a point → Who writes policy → Forum policy → Desktop is definitive → You are bound by current policy |
While we encourage participation by the whole community whenever we make a new rule, existing rules apply to you even if you weren't a part of the discussion that created them. You can't just ignore a rule because you didn't realise a discussion was ongoing or because you weren't even a member of our community when the rule was created. Neither can you ignore a rule simply because you've opened up a discussion that might lead to changing that rule.
Until and unless a rule is actually changed, you are bound by the rule as it currently reads. Do not take action based upon your proposal, nor allege that a rule couldn't possibly apply to you because you weren't able to discuss it.
We've been around since 2004. If we allowed people to "opt out" of rules simply because they didn't help write them, most of our rules wouldn't apply to anyone. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that every rule will be discussed by the community.
This policy does not apply to rules which have been vandalised. Since it is site policy that only admin (or their assignees) write policy, only admin can determine whether a rule has been vandalised, or otherwise unofficially changed, so that it no longer reflects a valid, "current state".
Contrariwise, this sometimes applies to things which have not actually been written anywhere (yet). Ideally, all past decisions and current practice should be written into explicit policy, but nobody's perfect. It makes sense to have a policy that says "even if the current setup isn't codified by a specific policy, you shouldn't, on a whim, try and implement a change that would have ramifications on thousands of pages without starting a discussion". So, in the above policy, the word "policy" doesn't just apply to those decisions that have been officially enshrined through discussion, but also refers to operating procedures that apply to multiple pages over large periods of time with the express knowledge of admins, even if these procedures technically contradict the results of a previous forum decision. Try not to make large scale changes to the wiki without opening a discussion about these changes first.
Of course, the difficult thing is that sometimes one does have to be bold for the good of the Wiki. If your edit is more constructive than it is disruptive, you can sometimes make a judgment call to ignore "current practice", for example by introducing a new type of pages to cover information that was hitherto missing from the Wiki. This doesn't mean you should ignore written policy — just that you shouldn't always fear the gaps in the said written policy.
