User:W. Frank

I was born in Dresden in the closing years of the second world war but I am now retired and have been living in Glasgow, formerly the Queen City of the British Empire, since the last century.

I used to drive trucks across the Sahara but can not write any Arabic.

My Rufname is Frank.

aide memoire

If I wasn't continually Prodded and Poaked by false allegations, I'd prefer to be a Wikignome but very occasionally I'm goaded into fluffing up an article or two: Choum, Nelson (England)



Global User Account

A perceptive comment by Peter (Southwood):
 * "...Possibly the majority of editors are not entirely familiar with all the details of all the policies, and would simply accept a claim that a relatively harmless edit was done following a stated policy assuming good faith on the part of the editor making the change.
 * When we see a trusted editor has made a change to an article on our watchlists, we generally assume good faith and don't bother to look more closely unless genuinely interested to see what improvement they have made.
 * This is a wiki, people edit. Mostly small changes like image placement are not worth arguing about, so we leave them. This will probably remain the case with right/left alignment. I really don't get upset by left alignment if it doesn't harm formatting. I also don't get upset if someone chooses to change it to right alignment if it makes no observable difference to the quality of the article. I don't even care if someone makes a habit of systematically rearranging image alignment as long as it does not go against a policy, and as long as nobody else objects. When someone else objects, I feel obliged to check if the objection is justified. When there is no functional reason for a change, I may take a side depending on what looks right to me.
 * I don't like unnecessary or unnecessarily inflexible rules. They stifle creativity and reduce the range of possibilities for development, and if they turn out to be a problem they are almost impossible to remove and cause endless strife.
 * As things stand, we all have carte blanche to make any change that we think improves an article as long as it does not go against a policy. This is implicit in the guiding principle "Plunge forward". The principle of consensus is only invoked if someone disagrees with that change.
 * There are maybe half a dozen of us debating this point. This is hardly representative of the community of editors, not even of admins. We couldn't claim a genuine consensus of the community even if we all agreed. Consensus by failure to object due to ignorance is not a logically or ethically defensible concept, even if it is implicitly used by governments."