On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 5:17 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/2 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a bug?
More significantly, is there evidence of community consensus?
There was a poll which came out about 59%:41% in favour, then Jimbo loudly and publicly requested that it be switched on. There's been a ton of publicity about it, and I find it frankly unbelievable it hasn't been mentioned even in passing in the WMF office. So if it's been sitting there for weeks so a dev can say "ah, but you didn't tick this box and file form 10-QF, so sorry" then that would be a marvellous illustration of passive sabotage, but not actually being helpful.
So, can anyone answer authoritatively?
As you may or may not be aware, after Jimbo threw his voice behind the issue he got a bunch of pushback from certain members of the community. At the time he ultimately ended up asking people to develop alternative proposals (or alternative ways of configuring Flagged Revisions). There was some discussion of this at various places for a couple weeks, but nothing that seemed to draw a lot of interest. So at least some delay was intentional to accommodate people who wanted to develop other points of view.
To the general question, the usual process (which is not necessarily the only process) is to file a bug request with specific configuration settings identified, and point to a community consensus that strongly favors adopting those settings. The FR trial proposal [1] that you mention with 60% support was specific, which is good. Though it is unclear whether 60% support is adequate for such a change. Historically, some devs have been lambasted for making much smaller changes with higher levels of support that nonetheless failed to reach a magical 2/3rds ratio (which some community members feel is the dead minimum for configuration changes). It is understandable that people can be reluctant to act if they know that either course is likely to draw criticism. If people on Wikipedia can't agree on what 60% support ought to mean, it is very difficult to ask the devs to figure it out.
At the current time, the way I see it there are three things that can happen:
1) A dev can stick his neck out to make a decision, either affirmative or negative, on whether the 60% survey justifies adopting the proposed "trial" settings. 2) The WMF can intervene to make a decision. 3) The enwiki community can try to reach a clearer consensus. (I do think one could build more than 60% support by compromising/engaging with some of the more moderate opposition.)
Personally, I'd regard 3) as the best outcome, while 2) is perhaps more likely. I would be surprised if any dev wants to jump into this absent either a stronger consensus or a WMF mandate. (Jimbo's personal opinion does not by itself constitute a mandate, though he could certainly put it on the Board's agenda and/or encourage Foundation staff to take up the issue.)
-Robert Rohde
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_revisions/Trial/Votes