On 2/4/08, NavouWiki navouwiki@gmail.com wrote:
- The intent behind the follow up message was to inform Tim and the
readership that I was separating Tim's idea from Tim. Tim is a good faith contributor to the project in many ways. Having a garbage idea is ok. It is allowed. It does not make anyone less faithful to the project.
- I want to encourage posting to folks talk pages rather than asking for
desysoppings. I want to encourage dispute resolution. This was not jabbish or lipservice.
By "jabs", I was referring to your cannonball/mosquito allegory and your complaint about the lack of warnings/notices/whatever by Tim on the other users' talk pages, which by no coincidence immediately followed the "garbage" comment.
By "lip-service", I was referring to the way you emphasize that you aren't questioning his intelligence, or his good faith, or whatever.
The mutual incongruity of your comments probably confuses the average reader.
- I did not express a concern regarding the injection of null edits into
the main page, I do express concern with changing the code of MediaWiki. This list however may not be the proper venue.
We've established a common motive for both actions, which is to make the main page undeletable by normal means. Whether or not this result is appropriate or necessary is a separate debate, but we've just witnessed both the elegant way and the absurd way of achieving it.
Now we have a patch or a hook or an extension or whatever which prohibits deletion of the main page, and according to Tim it is currently enabled on all Wikimedia sites. Equally importantly, it discourages further attempts to produce the same result by revision-crapflooding or some other yet unthought-of technique.
So maybe we should be discussing whether or not we want to keep this feature.
If I understand your comments correctly, you are opposed to it because there was no consensus for Tim to make this change, and because sysops should be able to take any action on any page, including the "Main" one, presumably because there might be a legitimate reason to do so.
I'm not really worried about the first point as Tim was only preserving the status quo (albeit through a superior method) but you might be surprised to know that I agree with you on the second one. (!!!)
But I will add that neither the problem being addressed (the main page being deleted every time an admin gets hacked or goes batshit) and the problem created by the solution ("legitimate" deletions or moves of the main page requiring assistance from the devs) is frequent or severe enough for me to strongly care one way or the other.
To conclude this discussion, if you want to open a Mostly Harmless straw poll on this issue, knock yourself out, but please do stop complaining about Tim, regardless of the venue.
—C.W.