On 5/22/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
Gregory Maxwell:
As far as I'm concerned, the ratings should not be tied to *any*
decision making process, anonymous or not. They are purely data
collection. Whether a version is stable, whether it is neutral, whether
it should go into the print edition, and so forth, these decisions
should be made in consensus if at all possible. (This can be a speedy
"If there are no objections, this article will be .." type process as
long as all decisions are reversible.)
eh. They are not useful at all if not ever used as part of a decision
process. I didn't suggest that we'd ever have policy that is directly
dependant on them. When I decide I'm going to burn a CD of wikipedia,
I'll take the data and massage it before using it to decide what I put
on my CD. If you don't like my decisions, feel free to not download
the ISOs I make :).
A peer review process, in my opinion, must be tied to
*discussion* first
of all, and not to voting.
Right, well we have that today. A tally can be one way of formalizing
the results of a discussion. I am a card carrying member of the
'voting is not the answer' crowd.
Voting is a valid last resort, but not a
generally good way to review an encyclopedia. It would be very bitter if
a simple software feature could be used to overthrow years of
consensus-building culture on Wikipedia.
You're jumping to a conclusion no one has suggested, relax. I agree.
I am somewhat concerned that the fact that these
ratings will be public
will be used to influence discussion. I hope when this feature goes into
beta, we will have a clear and public policy that these ratings have no
relevance whatsoever to ongoing discussions and decision making
processes. Otherwise I strongly oppose this feature being taken live in
the first place. I have no objection to people using the ratings to
build a list of pages to work on, as long as the question whether the
pages do, in fact, need work remains a community decision.
People execute polls on wikipedia (at least the english one that I
read) all the time. It hasn't killed us yet. :)