I would normally start by floating this on wikien-L or on-wiki at the usual places, but the time for that has passed and thus I am going to drop this on the Foundation, who I believe are responsible for the particular problem here.
On the English language Wikipedia, there has been a longstanding discussion / dispute / evolving consensus on how long is appropriately long for major site policy discussions. For varying areas, there are no limits to discussion period, a week or longer, 3 days, 2 days, 24 hrs, and so forth.
It's generally held - in my opinion - that major events or changes should be on the order of a week or longer.
I bring this up because I left town on the 10th aware of various SOPA discussions but unaware of an organized intention to blackout on the 18th, and returned to editing today to find that it's tomorrow and that it's all decided now, thank you very much, your opinion no longer desired.
It appears that this was done to match the other organizations' pre-announced Jan 18th blackouts. It also appears that this was instigated on or around the 13th by Foundation staff.
In the intervening days, someone appears to have decided without seeking consensus that 3 days was enough time to discuss and decide, announced such, had the discussion, called a consensus (with, admittedly, most of the active editing community participating) and started implementation.
It's not clear from reading stuff who decided that 3 days was enough time for the final formatted discussion and consensus to be valid. It is clear that the timing that led up to it was discussions the Foundation initiated in detail, with specified date etc, less than a week from the proposed date.
I do not see in any of that which came before an awareness of length-of-policy-discussion issues or preferences, a meta-discussion about how long to discuss, etc. It appears and seems likely (much less, assumptions of good faith) that this was simply overlooked.
That said, this is a Big Deal, and it appears that the Foundation collectively blew it on that aspect. Elements of the community also blew it.
The community has been trending downwards in acceptance of shorter discussions on things. To a degree this is useful - we need the ability to make timely decisions. To a degree this is harmful - lack of ability for all involved to see and participate due to timings; lack of depth of discussion and reflection. It's a dynamic and evolving standard. But it's a standard, and should not be casually ignored.
I would like to bring this point to the Foundation - staff and board - and ask that you understand that on the occasion that you want to push for a content or onwiki policy change and ask for community consensus on things, that you need to make proper allowances for time for discussion. Ideally, it should be enough time to frame a discussion, have a discussion within the framework amounting to a week or more, and then find consensus and implement. This would normally amount to something approximating 2 weeks of lead time or longer. This was not a policy or operational emergency, justifying either fix-first-then-discuss or a much shortened discussion. Everyone knew back in December that people at other sites were planning or discussing the 18th. If the Foundation had any inkling it was going to intervene and drive this, it should have been planning ahead of time.
Thank you.
Hi George,
The push came about after the IRC office hours.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2012-01-12
-- John Vandenberg
The "Learn More" link at en.wp is blocked too.
On 18 January 2012 05:04, Chris Lee theornamentalist@gmail.com wrote:
The "Learn More" link at en.wp is blocked too.
Works fine for me (and I can read about SOPA and PIPA too), but I've seen a couple of reports of it not working.
- d.
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 5:18 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Hi George,
The push came about after the IRC office hours.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2012-01-12
After ongoing review of the IRC thread, on-wiki threads, mailing lists etc...
I think the key failure seems to have happened during the IRC office hours, and has no single party at fault.
Sue repeatedly stated that her and the Foundation intention was to encourage but not drive the community to a decision. The analogy to the Quaker meetings "So, is this what we're agreed to?" was made, mechanics of community consensus discussed, etc.
I think that this was entirely appropriate for Sue to take as a stance, for the Foundation to take as a stance, etc. What seems to have failed is the feedback mechanisms.
Let me restate here my opinion that 3-4 days over a weekend is not nearly enough time to frame a question adequately to the total en.wikipedia community, hold a community RFC / discussion / whatever, review and judge the emergent consensus, and proceed. There were a number of people within the en.wp community in the IRC chat who have been around the track a number of times, have (I believe) previously publicly agreed with me on this opinion, and failed to feed that back.
There was also a disturbing undercurrent of whether people were or were not being criticized for opposing taking action; The "Oh, no, it's fine to oppose" was stated repeatedly, but more than one nasty exchange ensued which I can only attribute to that.
It seems like the outcome of that discussion was that there was rough working majority that doing something was a good idea, and that everyone still standing at the end of it agreed that it was reasonable and practical to do something in the remaining 4 days. The former appears reasonable and accurate and was born out by the eventual short-time RFC on-wiki. The latter... seems to have been an accidental groupthink rather than a reasoned conclusion.
It's repeatedly stated for example on-wiki on noticeboards and in Arbcom cases and the like that "IRC is not Wikipedia". In this case, the key inertia for on-wiki action was swung out of this with a presumption on reasonableness of timing that doesn't stand up.
The questions of whether it was morally or organizationally "right" to oppose SOPA were fought over a bit (on IRC and on-wiki) but generally consensus is that it's ok, and that a clear overwhelming majority of the community opposes SOPA.
The question of whether enough time existed at the time of the conversation to act was asked - and missed, deflected, mis-answered by people who were outside the community, mis-answered by people within the community. It was not well posed, either on IRC or in the following on-wiki discussions, and was got wrong.
My message coming out of this - to the Foundation (staff and Board) - is that you cannot and should not trust anyone (and by this I mean ANYONE) who tries to tell you or argue that reasonable, stable, long-term non-divisive en.wikipedia consensus can be got in anything less than about two weeks, and longer is better. Barring emergencies, it would be best for the Foundation to structurally avoid attempting any action without something on the order of that much lead time or longer when community consultation or involvement is required.
You run a rather bad risk of source bias, if the right key people happen to be proponents of one particular position, that they will then unintentionally slant the discussion in such a way that makes rushing things seem more reasonable than it really is. This is not good decisionmaking process.
It's worth pointing out the discussion was open from 15 December to 16 January before any close. (Note: 15 December is not when it actually started, it's when it was formally opened as a community discussion - earlier suggestions were also discussed less formally from 10 December on various pages).
Usual discussions last from 5 - 7 days (deletions) to 10 days (adminship) to 14 days (arbitrator elections). This had over 30 days formal discussion. By 13 - 16 January it's reasonable to say that if someone who knew the community's approaches to discussions, or read a wide range of pages, had wished, there was ample time to state a view, and many, many did.
Some people only heard at the last minute, or didn't realize it was serious, or missed it, or if some people feel it should have also been advertized in yet more venues. It's hard to do everything right; neither you or I organized it.
But even if someone had responded it is incredibly unlikely that anything would have changed. Since then, every feedback the community has had, whether Sue's blog, twitter, otrs, or on-wiki, has confirmed the same overwhelming decision. All that might have been missed around 13 - 16 January was the closers deciding to close it in line with a technical request from developers to allow them 48 hours and hence make a decision by the 16th. There was a month when it was open before then.
FT2
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:39 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It's worth pointing out the discussion was open from 15 December to 16 January before any close.
No, there was informal discussion going back into December. "The discussion" - the concrete, date-attached specific policy and implementation proposals and so forth - was about 3 days worth.
People talking about it and bandying informal ideas around for a month doesn't make it a formal consensus discussion.
That having happened is why anyone reasonable here should be starting from the point that the sense of the community was correctly identified through all this, which I don't dispute. But bare sense of the community is mob rule. Wikipedia is not a majority-rules, snap decisions mob, despite occasional resemblance thereof. It is not well served when community leaders treat it as such, or the Foundation acts in a manner to encourage that behavior.
That way lies even more madness and despair, and a break with a lot of currently very carefully (if badly) balanced precedent and informal process.
I don't believe the decision was *wrong* - But a poorly made decision that's right can set a behavioral and decisionmaking precedent that is in its own way far worse than having made a wrong decision.
There are a whole raft of nuanced issues that were bulldozed in all of this, ranging from the wisdom of WMF / Wikipedia taking political stands organizationally, to lack of sufficient consideration for the invisible third leg of the stool (the readers / userbase), to rapidity of decisionmaking, to aspects of the community majority bullying those who for some reason opposed the change.
Again - the decision wasn't *wrong*. I certainly oppose SOPA, understand why other organizations blacked out and WMF and the community sought to do so here. SOPA is wrong on more political, policy, and technical levels than I can conveniently count in one email.
But it can be wrong, and WMF could potentially be wrong to engage in the advocacy action. It can be wrong, and the community can damage itself significantly in making snap decisions on objecting to SOPA.
It can be wrong enough, apparently, to convince its opponents that opposing it is enough to justify bulldozing the usual Wikipedia community process.
If people wanted this badly to do it, the actual solid RFC should have been going in late December or first week of January. Eventually, procrastinating precludes reasonable responsible action. It does not appear to have prevented effective or community supported action, in the end, but the reasonableness and responsibleness of the process is the issue.
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 4:24 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:39 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It's worth pointing out the discussion was open from 15 December to 16 January before any close.
No, there was informal discussion going back into December. "The discussion" - the concrete, date-attached specific policy and implementation proposals and so forth - was about 3 days worth.
People talking about it and bandying informal ideas around for a month doesn't make it a formal consensus discussion.
That is very true. But it is also true that we would not have gotten to the formal vote stage in the first place, and certainly not a quick vote, if there hadn't been quite substantial support shown for the idea of a protest all the way along in discussion. I don't think that anyone can say consensus was trending one way and then a quick weekend vote overturned it and went a totally different way; I think that weekend vote confirmed what was already becoming quite clear, and the multiple questions helped iron out the details.
The community no doubt could have kept discussing for another week or month. But to push out a decision we did have to, well, decide. As it was there was only barely enough time to get things working technically (and there are still substantial bugs). I can only congratulate our amazing staff and volunteer community for working under immense pressure, over a long weekend and all night, to make it happen.
So why, you may reasonably ask, was a short deadline set? Well, politics. Initially we thought that there was going to be a serious hearing on SOPA on the 18th, so several sites called for a boycott that day. Then that hearing was postponed at the last moment, but it was unclear to when or for how long. And PIPA is *still* up for a vote next week. Time is *short*, by any measure, and it's not always clear when the best moment to do things on the hill. In 20/20 hindsight I'd argue today was actually a fantastic day to do it -- the congress is just back, it's kind of a slow news day otherwise, and we appear to have hit both bills in a time when people are still making up their minds and gauging support. And the effect of coordinating with other sites shouldn't be underestimated -- I've heard this referred to as "black Wednesday", one of the largest acts of online activism ever. We made a difference, all speaking as internet citizens, and it does take time -- and a set date -- to coordinate with other sites. We helped lead that effort. It was worth it.
I agree with you -- more time is better, and a few days is not enough to come to full community-wide consensus. While there will always be people missing from the table, for one reason or another, we should work hard to minimize that effect whenever possible. But I *do* think a few days is enough time to make sure that you have a *reasonable* consensus, especially when you've got 1800 people participating and a very clear trend; and I think with all these other factors considered we did a pretty good job of balancing the timing issues. Someone needed to move for an RfC if we were going to make any decision happen in a reasonable time frame; the WMF likely wouldn't have gotten involved at all if we didn't need that buffer time to, well, turn the site off (and no one wanted to spend a whole lot of extra tech staff and communications staff time on the protest if it wasn't wanted).
I realize that I speak from a privileged position here, of having been heavily involved and paying close attention to SOPA discussions for weeks, and that may be one of the problems -- it is easy to forget, when you have had something very much on your mind, that not everyone has paid such attention to it. In future certainly even fast actions should be better communicated through all our channels, and we should spend more time on the !votes if we have it.
But I am also pleased that when it comes right down to it -- this community can still be bold.
There are a whole raft of nuanced issues that were bulldozed in all of this, ranging from the wisdom of WMF / Wikipedia taking political stands organizationally, to lack of sufficient consideration for the invisible third leg of the stool (the readers / userbase), to rapidity of decisionmaking, to aspects of the community majority bullying those who for some reason opposed the change.
At least to your first point -- I will say that this was done with thought, from the WMF's point of view. In fact it was done with a whole lot of thought -- big discussions around the Italian protest action, legal analysis from our lawyers, Board discussions around advocacy, and general consensus that opposing these bills was the right thing to do.
The community en.wp decision is separate, but it was also nuanced, and so I don't think it's true that all these issues were bulldozed, within Wikipedia or the WMF. (I don't know about the bullying aspect; I hadn't encountered that or heard other complaints about it, but I am concerned to hear this report -- that's certainly no good.)
And as for the readers? I suspect a whole lot of people are realizing that they take Wikipedia for granted today. If anyone wants to see the kind of impact we've made, media coverage is a reasonable proxy; there's an in-process list of stories going here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_SOPA_blackout/Media
Thanks George for your thoughtful notes, as ever; and I'll repeat something here that I said somewhere else -- that these questions of advocacy, of what battles we fight and how, and how we decide, are ones that we will have to work on together, as a community. This is uncharted territory for all of us.
I won't claim that I, personally, was certain this protest was the right thing to do -- but I was pretty sure, and I am glad that I got the chance to talk it over with others, who were also pretty sure; and I am very glad that collectively the decision went the way it did -- because I think in the end it was the right one. But you know what? We'll keep on talking about it, either way; we can only learn from the things that went wrong; and we can decide together whether it sets a precedent (or doesn't) and what that means.
-- phoebe
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:02 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 4:24 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:39 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It's worth pointing out the discussion was open from 15 December to 16 January before any close.
No, there was informal discussion going back into December. "The discussion" - the concrete, date-attached specific policy and implementation proposals and so forth - was about 3 days worth.
People talking about it and bandying informal ideas around for a month doesn't make it a formal consensus discussion.
That is very true. But it is also true that we would not have gotten to the formal vote stage in the first place, and certainly not a quick vote, if there hadn't been quite substantial support shown for the idea of a protest all the way along in discussion. I don't think that anyone can say consensus was trending one way and then a quick weekend vote overturned it and went a totally different way; I think that weekend vote confirmed what was already becoming quite clear, and the multiple questions helped iron out the details.
I think it's more ambiguous than that - less concrete on what the weekend usefully did - but I do agree that the sense of the community was known ahead of time and represented accurately in the outcome, etc.
The community no doubt could have kept discussing for another week or month. But to push out a decision we did have to, well, decide. As it was there was only barely enough time to get things working technically (and there are still substantial bugs). I can only congratulate our amazing staff and volunteer community for working under immense pressure, over a long weekend and all night, to make it happen.
So why, you may reasonably ask, was a short deadline set? Well, politics. Initially we thought that there was going to be a serious hearing on SOPA on the 18th, so several sites called for a boycott that day. Then that hearing was postponed at the last moment, but it was unclear to when or for how long. And PIPA is *still* up for a vote next week. Time is *short*, by any measure, and it's not always clear when the best moment to do things on the hill. In 20/20 hindsight I'd argue today was actually a fantastic day to do it -- the congress is just back, it's kind of a slow news day otherwise, and we appear to have hit both bills in a time when people are still making up their minds and gauging support. And the effect of coordinating with other sites shouldn't be underestimated -- I've heard this referred to as "black Wednesday", one of the largest acts of online activism ever. We made a difference, all speaking as internet citizens, and it does take time -- and a set date -- to coordinate with other sites. We helped lead that effort. It was worth it.
I agree with you -- more time is better, and a few days is not enough to come to full community-wide consensus. While there will always be people missing from the table, for one reason or another, we should work hard to minimize that effect whenever possible. But I *do* think a few days is enough time to make sure that you have a *reasonable* consensus, especially when you've got 1800 people participating and a very clear trend; and I think with all these other factors considered we did a pretty good job of balancing the timing issues. Someone needed to move for an RfC if we were going to make any decision happen in a reasonable time frame; the WMF likely wouldn't have gotten involved at all if we didn't need that buffer time to, well, turn the site off (and no one wanted to spend a whole lot of extra tech staff and communications staff time on the protest if it wasn't wanted).
I realize that I speak from a privileged position here, of having been heavily involved and paying close attention to SOPA discussions for weeks, and that may be one of the problems -- it is easy to forget, when you have had something very much on your mind, that not everyone has paid such attention to it. In future certainly even fast actions should be better communicated through all our channels, and we should spend more time on the !votes if we have it.
(general agrees)
But I am also pleased that when it comes right down to it -- this community can still be bold.
We've all been around for a while. In my opinion, the success rate of community boldness is less than the success rate of community well-consideredness. In several cases tragically so. There's a certain disagreement on specific issues of the wisdom or lack thereof of some hard-to-find-consensus issues remaining open ones, but we've seen great wrongs done via snap decisions.
There are a whole raft of nuanced issues that were bulldozed in all of this, ranging from the wisdom of WMF / Wikipedia taking political stands organizationally, to lack of sufficient consideration for the invisible third leg of the stool (the readers / userbase), to rapidity of decisionmaking, to aspects of the community majority bullying those who for some reason opposed the change.
At least to your first point -- I will say that this was done with thought, from the WMF's point of view. In fact it was done with a whole lot of thought -- big discussions around the Italian protest action, legal analysis from our lawyers, Board discussions around advocacy, and general consensus that opposing these bills was the right thing to do.
The community en.wp decision is separate, but it was also nuanced, and so I don't think it's true that all these issues were bulldozed, within Wikipedia or the WMF. (I don't know about the bullying aspect; I hadn't encountered that or heard other complaints about it, but I am concerned to hear this report -- that's certainly no good.)
There was bullying in the IRC session, bullying on the VP, bullying in talk pages, bullying in the RFC. I don't know if it prevented anyone from being heard - some of the people being bullied were pretty forceful individual personalities who tend to keep on pushing if they think they have a point. But some may not have been. I don't imagine that enough were deterred from commenting that the sense of the community statistically is inaccurate, but the way we treat the opposing voices matters, here and elsewhere.
And as for the readers? I suspect a whole lot of people are realizing that they take Wikipedia for granted today. If anyone wants to see the kind of impact we've made, media coverage is a reasonable proxy; there's an in-process list of stories going here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_SOPA_blackout/Media
I've been following along a bunch of media all day, and they range from neutral to positive coverage. Along with blogs and social media commentary.
I did not expect a negative backlash, and don't see one. But I understand and wanted more time to hear from those who had contrary opinions on that.
Thanks George for your thoughtful notes, as ever; and I'll repeat something here that I said somewhere else -- that these questions of advocacy, of what battles we fight and how, and how we decide, are ones that we will have to work on together, as a community. This is uncharted territory for all of us.
I won't claim that I, personally, was certain this protest was the right thing to do -- but I was pretty sure, and I am glad that I got the chance to talk it over with others, who were also pretty sure; and I am very glad that collectively the decision went the way it did -- because I think in the end it was the right one. But you know what? We'll keep on talking about it, either way; we can only learn from the things that went wrong; and we can decide together whether it sets a precedent (or doesn't) and what that means.
I like talking. I am glad everyone's done a fair amount of that. 8-)
One additional thing - this was predictable ahead of time. The scheduling - the 18th - might not have been back in December, but one could have predicted a mid-Jan somethingish date.
In a sense, nobody getting out ahead of it in terms of in-wiki leadership may have been the goof. We could have had a date-to-be-filled-in formal consensus exercise starting a week or two in to the on-wiki informal discussion (say, late Dec or first week of January). Even if it wasn't clear what date it would take effect on, that would have given time to get the consensus properly consensed.
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 wasn't involved but I can guess one key issue. On this of all things, the foundation's hands were tied,. it could not pre-empt the community or do things in a way that would let it be seen as foundation pushing, or hinting, or anything. And the community.... well.... it just yapped and yapped, as it does.
A communal formal RFC Dec 20, saying "decision by Jan 5 so whatever happens we are ready and the foundation knows what's asked of it" would have been sensible. In itrs absence and with discussion underway, could the foundation have said "we need a decision by X date" or "you might want to close this by X date given politics"? Probably. Live and learn, consensus was apparent and agreed, and.. yeah, the process could be smoother another time. Maybe in another 11 years ..... :)
FT2
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 2:27 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.comwrote:
In a sense, nobody getting out ahead of it in terms of in-wiki leadership may have been the goof. We could have had a date-to-be-filled-in formal consensus exercise starting a week or two in to the on-wiki informal discussion (say, late Dec or first week of January). Even if it wasn't clear what date it would take effect on, that would have given time to get the consensus properly consensed.
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.
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.
On 19 January 2012 02:27, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:02 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
The community en.wp decision is separate, but it was also nuanced, and so I don't think it's true that all these issues were bulldozed, within Wikipedia or the WMF. (I don't know about the bullying aspect; I hadn't encountered that or heard other complaints about it, but I am concerned to hear this report -- that's certainly no good.)
There was bullying in the IRC session, bullying on the VP, bullying in talk pages, bullying in the RFC.
That's worrying. Do you have diff links?
- d.
I do agree that this kind of action must be severely limited. We cannot go on like this; we've used up our shutdown for about five years. The shutdown makes waves, but its effect will diminish with overuse. This is the kind of thing we should not repeat for a long while.
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 5:24 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.comwrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:39 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It's worth pointing out the discussion was open from 15 December to 16 January before any close.
No, there was informal discussion going back into December. "The discussion" - the concrete, date-attached specific policy and implementation proposals and so forth - was about 3 days worth.
People talking about it and bandying informal ideas around for a month doesn't make it a formal consensus discussion.
That having happened is why anyone reasonable here should be starting from the point that the sense of the community was correctly identified through all this, which I don't dispute. But bare sense of the community is mob rule. Wikipedia is not a majority-rules, snap decisions mob, despite occasional resemblance thereof. It is not well served when community leaders treat it as such, or the Foundation acts in a manner to encourage that behavior.
That way lies even more madness and despair, and a break with a lot of currently very carefully (if badly) balanced precedent and informal process.
I don't believe the decision was *wrong* - But a poorly made decision that's right can set a behavioral and decisionmaking precedent that is in its own way far worse than having made a wrong decision.
There are a whole raft of nuanced issues that were bulldozed in all of this, ranging from the wisdom of WMF / Wikipedia taking political stands organizationally, to lack of sufficient consideration for the invisible third leg of the stool (the readers / userbase), to rapidity of decisionmaking, to aspects of the community majority bullying those who for some reason opposed the change.
Again - the decision wasn't *wrong*. I certainly oppose SOPA, understand why other organizations blacked out and WMF and the community sought to do so here. SOPA is wrong on more political, policy, and technical levels than I can conveniently count in one email.
But it can be wrong, and WMF could potentially be wrong to engage in the advocacy action. It can be wrong, and the community can damage itself significantly in making snap decisions on objecting to SOPA.
It can be wrong enough, apparently, to convince its opponents that opposing it is enough to justify bulldozing the usual Wikipedia community process.
If people wanted this badly to do it, the actual solid RFC should have been going in late December or first week of January. Eventually, procrastinating precludes reasonable responsible action. It does not appear to have prevented effective or community supported action, in the end, but the reasonableness and responsibleness of the process is the issue.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Mono monomium@gmail.com wrote:
I do agree that this kind of action must be severely limited. We cannot go on like this; we've used up our shutdown for about five years. The shutdown makes waves, but its effect will diminish with overuse. This is the kind of thing we should not repeat for a long while.
+1 (personal opinion). This is an extraordinary measure and should be used extremely judiciously. I believe it has been, here.
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 4:34 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Mono monomium@gmail.com wrote:
I do agree that this kind of action must be severely limited. We cannot go on like this; we've used up our shutdown for about five years. The shutdown makes waves, but its effect will diminish with overuse. This is the kind of thing we should not repeat for a long while.
+1 (personal opinion). This is an extraordinary measure and should be used extremely judiciously. I believe it has been, here.
I Agree. Next time we should just migrate and fork to a jurisdiction outside the US control. If that is needed.
The question is, do you plan to migrate the major search engines and DNS servers? If so, then migration might help.
FT2
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com
wrote:
Next time we should just migrate and fork to a jurisdiction outside the US control. If that is needed.
On 19 January 2012 17:15, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
The question is, do you plan to migrate the major search engines and DNS servers? If so, then migration might help.
Come the SOPAcalypse, the DNS root will fragment. I wonder if Google will break itself up for the purpose.
- d.
Point of information: - are proposals mooted for an alternative DNS root? Presumably, since satellite proposals exist and those are even more radical.
FT2
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 5:20 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Come the SOPAcalypse, the DNS root will fragment. I wonder if Google will break itself up for the purpose.
On 19 January 2012 17:26, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Point of information: - are proposals mooted for an alternative DNS root? Presumably, since satellite proposals exist and those are even more radical.
There are many existing alternate roots. I suspect it would break into national or continental roots who trust each other to some degree, then may federate without the US.
- d.
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