On 09/17/11 11:48 PM, Ev. Jorgen. wrote: Maybe they are just discouraged by the bureaucratic process. Even when only a small number of unrepresentative people oppose a sensible idea the task of bringing about changes becomes onerous. Rather than trying to debate the rules it is simpler to just go ahead and make the changes on the affected mainspace pages despite the rules. IAR is one of our greatest rules. Ec

On 09/17/11 6:04 PM, MuZemike wrote: Resistance to change is a chronic disease. At the same time voting is evil for the very reason that you state. That is made worse by framing questions in a win/lose context. I have consistently believed that no vote should ever be closed completely. Action thresholds can be defined, but that should not close a vote. People should be allowed to continue voting indefinitely, or even change their original vote, until a change threshold is reached. That change may never become a reality, but even the right to support the obvious gives a feeling of participation. Ec

Yes the pedia is somewhat ossified and change in many areas is difficult to achieve. You only have to look at the various attempts to reform RFA to see that. Of course there are many possible changes that fail because they only have minority support, and while it might be frustrating for the minority who advocate such schemes, it is much easier to accept losing an argument when you are clearly in a minority. Where the process becomes more problematic is when you have a blocking minority preventing change. To my mind consensus based decision making requires a high proportion of participants to be willing to consider other people's viewpoints and seek a consensus solution. Where this becomes frustrating is when you have dogmatic minorities who don't need to consider compromise because they have sufficient numbers to block any change. Where consensus becomes pernicious is when a minority can achieve change against the will of the majority, we see that in the ratcheting of standards at RFA; Once we have over 30% of RFA !voters who want an additional hurdle to adminship then that change has happened, and the de facto bar for adminship has risen a further notch. Most of our current admins went through RFA in an era where 3,000 manual edits and 12 months tenure were far more than one needed to be taken as a serious candidate. If you ran today with only 12 months tenure you might get through, but you risk being told that you are not yet really part of our community. By process of candidates failing to get consensus for promotion the de facto standards at RFA ratchet upwards. That standards inflation has not come about because of a series of consensus or even majority based decisions to change the criteria at RFA, it has come about because minorities emerge who are willing to oppose candidates who don't meet certain thresholds of tenure and editcountitis. WereSpielChequers

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:38 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: Doesn't this approach assume that people all interact with Wikipedia in the same way? Many people only participate in a vanishingly small part of Wikipedia and you can have some areas that are deserted and others that are very active. This isn't found by looking at global statistics, but by looking at the actual editing and histories out there "on the ground". Carcharoth

On 09/19/11 11:35 AM, Carcharoth wrote: Most don't just interact in different ways, but at different times. I may have been interested in a topic a year ago, When the topic seemed stable I would have gone on to something very different several times over the course of the year. Now, when the year-old topic bursts into flames, giving it due consideration requires that I put aside my current interests to defend the old topic from people who show no evidence of having put any serious study. They may just be applying some new rule on a policy page whose changes I would have had no reason to monitor. If my previous work was referenced with borrowed books I may no longer have access to those books to support my case. Ec

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>wrote;wrote: Definitely a good point, especially if we want to fold in NS5 contributions into any study. Steven

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Sorry if that was cryptic. NS5 = namespace five = Project talk. Steven

On 09/19/11 12:03 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: Most dangerously, they could catch a clue. Ec