On 10/1/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
If you mean that people are so entrenched in bureaucracy that they miss the big picture, I'll agree with you on this point.
No, that's not what I mean at all. People were talking about how to automate the deletion process and were coming up with methods that would require people to do their deletions in the same (or similar) ways as the English Wikipedia. People didn't realise that they were implicitly assuming that deletions would be taking place according to enwiki policy.
I see what you mean now. The latter might be a symptom of the same tunnel vision I was referring to.
In practice, most of the "procedure" might as well be automated already. Consider that a non-savvy user reading the fancy instruction system found on a page like [1] will probably assume that "per-page deletion polling" is a facet of the site software itself, rather than the result of the hacks upon hacks we've made to accommodate the (increasingly complex) way we do (relatively simple) things on the English Wikipedia.
I guess it just goes to show that idiot-proofing, crowd control, and instruction creep are three intimately related concepts.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Se...
—C.W.