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.