Joseph Reagle wrote:
On Wednesday 14 November 2007, Philip Sandifer wrote:
You're mostly just restating the basic paradox here. Yes - we want an open discourse-based project. On the other hand, an extended six month saga of forum shopping a doomed cause is not useful - it's counter- productive, engenders bad faith and assumptions thereof, increases wikistress, and sucks time and air away from the business of improving articles.
In other governance systems, particularly consensus ones, there is often a notion of membership, or members in good standing, and a notion of precedent. This is important so that participation is not gamed -- like in the OOXML standardization games that have now wrecked the committee
Standardization has a superficial appeal because it, theoretically at least, makes everything predictable, orderly and easy to use. That's why we put blinders on horses. The dark side of standardization is in the way it resists change.
Ec