Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 8/21/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
My support for the whole endeavour, for one.
[snip]
I hope you understand that getting the permission of each and every user before making a change is a solution which doesn't scale.
Who said anything about asking anyone's permission? I would have supported the experiment if its design had simply been made clear from the outset (unless it had been a stupid design, of course, in which case I would have spontaneously voiced objections and suggestions to improve it. No need to actually _ask_ me about it).
For your reference, there have been people watching this for clearly negative impacts all along. Had there been substantial evidence that it was doing a significant amount of harm, it would have been aborted.
Back on 6/20/2006 there was this exchange on the mailing list in the thread ""the experiment" - did it work?":http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-June/049320.html
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
It worked, though.
It is not clear to me that it did. I would love for us to have some serious analysis of that.
Apparently even Jimbo was unaware that there was any analysis going on, and he's the one who initiated the experiment in the first place. How is anyone else supposed to know what's going on?
Our retention of deleted metadata is just as robust as anything else...
No it isn't. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review: "The archive of deleted page revisions may be periodically cleared. Pages deleted prior to the database crash on 8 June 2004 are not present in the current archive because the archive tables were not backed up. This means pages cannot be restored by a sysop. If there is great desire for them it may be possible to retrieve them from the old database files. Prior to this, the archive was cleared out on 3 December 2003."
Deleted versions can't be relied on, who knows when the deletion database will be cleared again?
All I ask is a little transparency. There's no reason for any of this to be kept secret.