Jimmy Wales wrote:
Exactly. Far too often we have endless a priori debates about certain things, debates which lead nowhere because we have no evidence. A better approach is to be flexible and try things and see what happens, and proceed thoughtfully based on lessons learned.
Yes, but it would be nice if those experiments were driven by Wikipedia's needs per se, not by PR. Now this may have some positive impact on Wikipedia (though I personally doubt it), but the timing sure looks suspiciously like it was done for PR purposes, so we can say in response to the current media frenzy of the week that we're "doing something".
-Mark