Luis, the thread:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/352923
On 04/26/2013 06:00 AM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
it's straight up obnoxious to come into a thread
and undermine
a topic people care about by calling it "a waste of bytes and people's
attention".
No, David isn't calling the *topic* a waste; he's saying that it's more
valuable to hear lawyers speak about this particular messy legal topic
than to hear non-lawyers argue about it.
Also, you should seriously look up the definition of
the work bikeshedding.
It's the theory that organizations give undue weight to trivial issues.
Not organizations - noisy individuals.
http://bikeshed.org/ "the amount
of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the
complexity of the change." Specifically, it's an observation that lots
of people speak up when something comes up where they can have an
opinion. From the canonical email:
In Denmark we call it "setting your
fingerprint". It is about
personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point
somewhere and say "There! *I* did that." It is a strong trait in
politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just
think about footsteps in wet cement.
Regardless, it's fine for David to opine that lawyers' opinions do carry
more weight here than non-lawyers'.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation