On 19 January 2012 02:27, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
It sounds like the Foundation was more organized about it than the community, and didn't reach out to push early enough. I understand the desire not to be seen to be leading the community around, but it seems to have led to a counterproductively late push (from my point, of lack of community discussion time). Given the depth of Foundation internal discussions, perhaps it should have been earlier, at least in a "heads-up" sense asking for the community to start prepping / get more result-focused.
I'm really not sure it would have made any difference. The Wikipedia community will fiddle around the edges of an issue *forever*. If you say to a bunch of Wikipedians "the sky is blue", they'll come back with a hundred pages of referenced counterexamples. The key skill to being a Wikipedia editor appears to be generalised cross-domain bikeshedding.
What absolutely amazes me about this whole thing is that several hundred Wikipedians largely agreed on *anything at all*.
- d.