On Dec 21, 2007 4:03 PM, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Matthew Britton wrote:
Limiting the number of messages an individual is permitted to post will only prevent active, honest individuals being insightful or helpful once they have used up their quota. If someone really wants to make themselves heard, they will simply subscribe multiple addresses to the list and continue posting. Only those who play by the rules will lose
out.
If it is a social norm, like normal Wikipedia social norms, it can be roughly flexible enough to prevent either of those problems.
I think a policy of 1 or 2 posts a day, adhered to as a social norm, will make it possible for active, honest, insightful, thoughtful good people to be *more* heard. What we have right now is a small number of people (and only by chance I was not among them this month, I am surely an offender myself in the category of latching onto a thread and discussing it far beyond the point of positive returns!)... a small number of people making a disproportionate number of posts.
<snip>
It's hard to miss the irony that your 4th post in 24 hours is being used to encourage people to limit postings to 1 or 2 per day.
Similarly, I don't think anyone here is really worried that 7 of Anthere's last 9 messages were off-topic or otherwise unjustified.
Whether by technical restrictions or "social norms", at best these proposals will cut down on the volume, and do relatively little to improve the signal to noise ratio.
Personally, I'm more inclined to agree with Brianna that the problem is one of format more than one of over-participation per se. Foundation-l mixes announcements about board resolutions, changes in staffing, meta level discussions on copyright, the occasional general complaint (e.g. "Racism on Commons" / "Checkuser abuse" threads), and discussions of who is honoring or vilifying us now.
As Brianna suggests, a forum or blog may well be a better way to structure some of these topics. Personally, I know if announcements had a blog structure, I'd use RSS to keep track of the new topics and only worry about following the feedback comments for topics that I was directly interested in rather than having to recieve copies of every comment.
At some level Foundation-l is a victim of Wikimedia's success. Long-term growth in the brand must inevitably filter into growth in the conversation about Wikimedia. Maybe one can stem that tide for a while by asking for restraint, but sooner or later the only real recourse is to restructure the conversation. Whether that restructuring is best accomplished by new mailing lists or new technologies, is a difficult question to answer, but I'm inclined to believe that mailing lists can't be the answer to everything.
-Robert A. Rohde