Gregory Maxwell wrote:
In any case, I'm curious about what you believe we lost that we could have had with additional planning?
My support for the whole endeavour, for one. The appearance of professionalism, for another. This thing looks like it was just a knee-jerk reaction to bad publicity.
We've lost a lot of time as well. It's been almost nine months now, during some of the most widespread publicity Wikipedia's ever had. If when analysis is finally published it turns out that this experiment had a major negative impact on new user participation it would have been nice to know that more quickly to limit the damage.
From a purely data standpoint probably not a whole lot was lost thanks to the thoroughness of the database's records, though having to rely on the deletion database for long-term information retention does make me a bit nervous. But that's not the only consideration here.