Slim Virgin wrote:
Okay, that was all I wanted to establish. Notices were posted in places that were on your watchlist, and you took part in a talk page discussion about it, saying you thought it was "excellent," *before* it went live. And yet now you say you didn't know about it.
You seem to misunderstand me, then. This discussion was apparently ongoing for four months, and I found out that it was going to move forward the day after I first hear about it.
That's not me knowing about it. That's like saying I watched the baseball game because I checked the score in the 9th inning and saw it was 8-1.
Look, I'm not having a go at you, and I'm sorry you're the person I'm focusing on. But I find this whole thing both funny and sad. People *did* know about this, and people *did* support it. Months later, Jimbo sees that NOR and V have the word "superseded" on them, and he worries that it sounds too close to "deprecated," so he removes those tags and expresses his concern that two important pages about separate concepts seem to have disappeared in some sense, and he wants to know whether this was discussed widely enough. This is a perfectly respectable position to take. I wasn't particularly keen on the word "superseded" myself.
I don't mind being the target, or I'd duck out of this. I think his concern is valid - when we preach about the core concepts so often, and he feels as if these core concepts have been changed in a way that even he didn't notice, he sees a problem. That's valid - again, I had no clue about these changes until the changes were imminent, and JzG and mikkalai have both expressed similar concerns.
Some of this might be what Pilotguy (I think) said earlier - maybe Jimbo doesn't know what's going on very well anymore. I have a hard time arguing it, seeing recent activity, but it harkens to a greater issue as to whether, when we're talking about the main issues that govern the site, we're actually getting a *true* consensus of the active editors, or simply a self-selecting consensus of those that show up. A self-selecting sample may work well at, say, WP:MUSIC, because it's ultimately only going to affect those editors who work within music guidelines. But when well-established - and in the case of folks like JzG, well-respected - editors feel blindsided by a change to the core policy (even if the change is cosmetic), there's a problem with our consensus building techniques. Whether we got it right with ATT doesn't mean the road we took was proper.
But because it's Jimbo, a bunch of people turn up wanting to agree with him, and then in fact go further than he went, saying they didn't know about it either, and if they had, they might have objected. Then we find out they *did* know about it, and didn't object at all.
I'm getting the impression that if Jimbo had turned up and said what a marvellous innovation it was and how he loved it, the pages of the authors would be full of barnstars today, possibly given by the same people who are now complaining. I'm not including you in that, Jeff, or Guy who posted earlier along the same lines, because I know you'd both be saying this regardless and I respect your opinion. But there are others who I know are just swinging with the wind, and it's really annoying. This was a good merge of two key policies, and it should be looked at on its merits, and not supported or derided based on who else is doing the same.
Well, yes, it works both ways on this. The "Cult of Jimbo" as I affectionately call it is always fine, as long as you're part of it, hehe. I know you know where I'm coming from, and I understand your frustration here as well. But I think we're not taking this as an opportunity to improve things for later - if it's a good idea, it'll happen, and it'll take longer, and I'll even get involved. But that doesn't mean we can't have a significant discussion as to how to improve the visibility of these issues so people who spend more time thna they should on this project know that they're on top of what's going on.
-Jeff