On 10/1/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If you mean
that people are so entrenched in bureaucracy that they
miss the big picture, I'll agree with you on this point.
No, that's not what I mean at all. People were talking about how to
automate the deletion process and were coming up with methods that
would require people to do their deletions in the same (or similar)
ways as the English Wikipedia. People didn't realise that they were
implicitly assuming that deletions would be taking place according to
enwiki policy.
I see what you mean now. The latter might be a symptom of the same
tunnel vision I was referring to.
In practice, most of the "procedure" might as well be automated
already. Consider that a non-savvy user reading the fancy instruction
system found on a page like [1] will probably assume that "per-page
deletion polling" is a facet of the site software itself, rather than
the result of the hacks upon hacks we've made to accommodate the
(increasingly complex) way we do (relatively simple) things on the
English Wikipedia.
I guess it just goes to show that idiot-proofing, crowd control, and
instruction creep are three intimately related concepts.
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/S…
—C.W.