Hoi,
At this moment the wikipedia-l is becoming increasingly irrelevant. This
is because more and more people are turning of because of the endless
discussions. Particularly the contributions of Mark Williamsom are both
excessive in number, he thinks this list is his personal soap box, and
increasingly agressive, het tells people what they have to do and in
turn gets banned on wikipedias as the appreciation for his behaviour.
The consequence is, that more and more people are not interested in what
the wikipedia-l has to say. There are people who have added Mark to
their spam list, there are people who disregard all threads that he
writes to, there are people that unsubscribed. Mark has been told on the
list and of the list, repeatedly by many people, that he is not
communicating effectively this way. The sad thing is that Mark has some
valid points to make, points that are drowned out by the torrent of
e-mails that he sends to make these points. I do not want him banned
because this is "throwing the child away with the washing water" (het
kind met het waswater weggooien).
I have discussed this with several people and Angela came up with a good
point. Her point was that in the "language discussions" it often is a
rehashing of positions and missing is the refactoring of this
information as you have on a Wiki. It is exactly right to have articles
on Meta discussing the languages and their issues. This makes for some
refactoring and persistency in the discussions and it allows for
discussions on the talk page. The wikipedia-l would then be used to give
a heads up about when things are disucussed on Meta and when there is a
tentative conclusion of these discussions.
I hope that this scheme is seen for what it is; it allows Mark to have
his say. It allows for better information on these issues on Meta. The
consequence is that the wikipedia-l will have less trafic and hopefully
other subjects important to the global wikipedias start to get some
space as well.
I hope Mark is willing to accept this because if things go on as they
do, I will ask if it is possible to have him banned from this list.
Thanks,
GerardM