RE: [Wikipedia-l] The relevance of this list and the endlessdiscussions

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 _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l