As somebody who's frequently accused of stirring up tempests in teapots, beating dead horses, and so on, I'm lately seeing the flip side of the coin here... with this big Rollback debate, I see large numbers of people getting heavily agitated with regard to a subject for which I truly see no really big deal worthy of being made in either direction. I guess I finally get to experience first-hand how I must have made a bunch of others feel like when I've gone on and on arguing about a subject that I was passionate on that they didn't give a fig about.
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
As somebody who's frequently accused of stirring up tempests in teapots, beating dead horses, and so on, I'm lately seeing the flip side of the coin here... with this big Rollback debate, I see large numbers of people getting heavily agitated with regard to a subject for which I truly see no really big deal worthy of being made in either direction. I guess I finally get to experience first-hand how I must have made a bunch of others feel like when I've gone on and on arguing about a subject that I was passionate on that they didn't give a fig about.
I'm the same way about the specific issue (I think it's a pointless thing to implement but also relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things), but I think I can see how for a lot of people the principle is probably much more important. I've only skimmed the outline of what's gone on but it strikes me as very similar to the disabling of anonymous page creation - a developer unilaterally flips a switch behind the scenes that changes how Wikipedia works, and then this is immediately declared the status quo and now a "consensus" is needed in order to reverse it. Not a good thing, it makes community-oriented editors feel cut out of the decision-making process and powerless so of course there's going to be push-back. Especially considering the other recent controversies along the same lines.
On 1/11/08, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
page creation - a developer unilaterally flips a switch behind the scenes that changes how Wikipedia works, and then this is immediately declared the status quo and now a "consensus" is needed in order to
Should there be some general policy where "controversial" code changes (as defined by some petition of angsty editors) are automatically rolled back pending further debate?
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 1/11/08, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
page creation - a developer unilaterally flips a switch behind the scenes that changes how Wikipedia works, and then this is immediately declared the status quo and now a "consensus" is needed in order to
Should there be some general policy where "controversial" code changes (as defined by some petition of angsty editors) are automatically rolled back pending further debate?
Perhaps. Personally, I'm just concerned about the apparent existence of a double standard. If developers (or other lone users) can change things at will but the general Wikipedia community needs to establish "consensus" to change them back, naturally there's going to be a strong imbalance of influence there since consensus is often hard to achieve.
I'm not sure exactly what the balance of influence _should_ be, but considering how the perceived (and also real) behind-the-scenes cliquishness of Wikipedia has been harming us recently this doesn't seem like the right approach. Volunteers don't appreciate being dictated to, especially not after they've been told that they're supposed to have a say in how things operate.
On 11/01/2008, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Volunteers don't appreciate being dictated to, especially not after they've been told that they're supposed to have a say in how things operate.
This is the crux of the issue.
I don't care about rollback one way or the other, really. What I do care about is a flagrant disregard for process -- and as Ken Arromdee implied: this change, unilaterally implemented by a developer without community consensus may not be harmful to the encyclopaedia, but the next one might be. Please let's not get ourselves into a situation where the devs can do what they want and the community is powerless.