On 8/28/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
I try to assume good faith, but the long lack of
information about this
started to make me strongly suspicious that no experiment was intended,
Jimbo wasn't interested in the actual impact on editing and just wanted
to make an appearance of "doing something" so press releases could be
issued to counter the bad PR of the Siegenthaler matter. While
countering bad PR is certainly a good and worthy goal, I would rather
not have random tempests-in-teapots spawn restrictions on Wikipedia
editing with no plan or options for ever repealing them if they turn out
to be counterproductive.
Well, Jimbo could be evil. Alternatively, he thought "here's an idea
for how to fix the problems we've been having, let's see how it goes".
6 months or whatever later, it seems to have been going fairly well,
and the only outcry is over the lack of formal experimentation, rather
than the result itself.
Simply having the means to verify that this
"experiment" _is_ in fact an
experiment, and not just something that had been called an experiment to
brush off any complaints that may have been raised over its
implementation, goes a long way toward easing my concerns.
If you mean he always intended for this to be a permanent change with
no chance of being repealed, and only called it an "experiment" to
make it easier to swallow, I think you're being unnecessarily harsh
and cynical.
Steve