On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 16:45, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Sarah wrote:
What is the problem with allowing editors to do this kind of thing manually -- open AfDs and RfCs, and the like? Why does there always have to be a template, just as a matter of interest?
Well, you hit the answer to your second question in your second paragraph: templates have been implemented largely to appease bots/scripts and to make the processes (and their related pages) more standardized and consistent. I think templates make much more sense in the context of something like speedy deletions: you want a consistent banner that auto-categorizes the page so that admins can review the queue later.
I wish we could introduce a rule that, whenever a process like this is automated, a manual way of doing it has to be allowed to co-exist. Consistency is good, but so are other things, like sanity.
We used to be able to file an article RfC manually, but now as I said if you try to add one to the page yourself, the bot reverts you. It would be a trivial matter to stop that from happening, but there's no will. Bots rule. :)
And RfC is one of the simpler processes (except when the bot isn't working, in which case everyone's stuck). But there are processes that really are impenetrable. Try opening a sockpuppet report. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/SPI/Guidanc...
Sarah