On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
I fail to see how this is contrary to the mission of the Wikimedia
Foundation to "empower and engage people around the world to collect
and develop educational content under a free license or in the public
domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally". I think it
promotes it, indirectly by making for a more friendly environment if
not directly by paving the way for real educational content.
Yes. "Making for a more friendly environment" is absolutely relevant to
that mission.
Thomas writes:
I do know when a discussion is irritating people -
they make that very
clear. What I don't understand is why it irritates them when they
could so easily ignore it. There are no limits on how many threads we
can have, so saying there are other more useful discussions is a
complete non-argument.
This is also about making for a more friendly environment. To be fair,
technology has backpedaled a bit here. Many modern mail clients don't
support killing threads, so you have to delete each new message as it comes
along, and have no choice but to read annoying subject headers every time.
[dear gmail: this is ridiculous.] Both of which make flames or other
deathless threads annoying proportional to their size.
There are two solutions to this problem -
people can ignore the threads they aren't interested in at negligible
cost to themselves, or other people can stop discussing the things
they are interested it, which is obviously a cost in itself.
This is the heart of the matter. A number of people have already stopped
discussing the things they are interested in here, or even reading
regularly, because they find this forum too noisy to use. So it is a
tradeoff between who feels comfortable posting and reading here.
Since this is one of the few cross-foundation channels, as many people as
possible should feel somewhat comfortable here. And since all channels can
be saturated -- and many people's responses indicate that this one gets
saturated for them by long contentious threads -- either the aggressive
posters or the saturated readers are going to find their preferred use of
the list frustrated.
If you find yourself posting for the fifth or eighth time to a thread,
please consider this tradeoff, and other ways to get your point across. I
prefer wikiessays (rc is a much harder channel to saturate), but ymmv.
SJ