On 03/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/3/06, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
People who follow such a call are often not very patient. We could have proected the whole site until the idiot-storm is over. With a big banner saying so.
That kind of reaction seems like going the wrong way. At the end of the day, Wikipedia wants to be open, and it wants to grow and develop.
Not to mention that it would show a po-faced lack of sense of humour. I always feel that an organisation has become too large when they react terribly to jokes.
We should look at these "idiot storms" as opportunities to attract new contributors. It would be cool if we could replace the {{test}} template with something like "Hey, thanks for the test - we've undone it now, use the sandbox if you need to test anything else. You wouldn't happen to know anything about <insert item from requests for expansion> or <another item> would you? We're short on information on them!"
You know, obsequiously assuming good faith even when presented with evidence to the contrary can have an amazing effect on basically good-hearted people.
I agree, although we don't have to wait for concensus to change {{test}}. A better solution would be to just make an alternate template (perhaps in the userspace). Hopefully this template will become popular through its use and effects.