On 8/28/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I try to assume good faith, but the long lack of information about this started to make me strongly suspicious that no experiment was intended, Jimbo wasn't interested in the actual impact on editing and just wanted to make an appearance of "doing something" so press releases could be issued to counter the bad PR of the Siegenthaler matter. While countering bad PR is certainly a good and worthy goal, I would rather not have random tempests-in-teapots spawn restrictions on Wikipedia editing with no plan or options for ever repealing them if they turn out to be counterproductive.
Well, Jimbo could be evil. Alternatively, he thought "here's an idea for how to fix the problems we've been having, let's see how it goes". 6 months or whatever later, it seems to have been going fairly well, and the only outcry is over the lack of formal experimentation, rather than the result itself.
Simply having the means to verify that this "experiment" _is_ in fact an experiment, and not just something that had been called an experiment to brush off any complaints that may have been raised over its implementation, goes a long way toward easing my concerns.
If you mean he always intended for this to be a permanent change with no chance of being repealed, and only called it an "experiment" to make it easier to swallow, I think you're being unnecessarily harsh and cynical.
Steve