![[Home]](http://meatballwiki.org/meatball.gif)
RoughConsensusAndWorkingCode
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesBasic working principle of the InternetEngineeringTaskForce (IETF). Implies that theoretical standards are useless.
Rough consensus (WhatIsConsensus?) provides for peer review of proposed standards.
The insistence on working code guarantees that:
- someone cares enough about something to actually implement it
- the standard is actually implementable (you'd be surprised how often this comes up)
- a reference implementation exists to use in judging compliance of other implementations
This may at first sound like WorseIsBetter, but it does not carry the same negative conotations.
The equivalent for a wiki is "rough consensus and working content". It is of no use to create a ShallowPage for some topic, even if there's rough consensus that the topic is important, if there's insufficient working content. It is of no use to argue against deletion by pointing out all the things that could be written about a topic - it is better to spend that time writing content on that topic.
The insistence on working content guarantees that:
- Someone cares enough about the topic to write something on it.
- Something meaningful can actually be written on the topic (you'd be surprised how often this comes up)
- A topic definition exists to use in judging whether further content is on-topic for the page.
Equally, one needs rough consensus as to exactly what the topic of a page is, if the title alone does not guarantee this. However, exact consensus is not needed - details can be dealt with later on, as they arise.