On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 10:23 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Everything is said and done for the Pontic Wikipedia for quite some time. Reading your reply, more will be said and done before Flagged Revisions will be implemented. Sad really.
Hoi polloi, First of all I should probably apologise for my previous post. I don't regret any of the things I said per se, only that I wasn't quite sober enough at the moment to notice I was addressing wikitech-l, not wikien-l. Had I been more aware of the audience I would have phrased things a bit differently, so sorry about that, devs.
However I will continue to address my colleagues on the English Wikipedia (civilly I hope) as I know many of them are reading this as well.
I've read many of the polls and have concluded we might have done better to take a more iterative approach to decision-making.
Simple questions, one at a time, starting with "should flaggedrevs be enabled in any way, shape, or form". Yes, there would have still been numerous emphatic nay-votes (including sitting arbitrators who would still decry flaggedrevs as "the end of Wikipedia" no matter what parameters are used), but there wouldn't be people opposing on the basis that they don't like a specific proposed configuration, because there would be no specific proposed configuration.
Of course there would still be those pesky mu votes from people who support the general idea but oppose because they think they need a specific proposed configuration first. However I trust the developers have chosen a reasonable middle-ground default settings for all the important variables. Once we had it turned on, we might have found some or several screws that needed tightening or loosening. We would have gotten a consensus to change anything that needed to be changed. And yes, we'd gotten a consensus that to turn it all off and forget about it, we could have done that too.
This may seem overly bureaucratic and I know it would be slow progress, but it would be measurable progress. We'd have had something to show for it every step of the way. Right now we have neither of these things.
I don't see the point in explicitly identifying anything as a "trial". Many of us don't like to like to think in these terms but everything we do, both here and in real life, is essentially done on a trial (and error) basis. Right now each one of us is either trying something new, or doing whatever has worked best so far, or repeating the same mistakes made previously.
Maybe it's too late ask anyone to take a leap of faith right now, but it might be something to consider "in the next iteration" (to quote a dear friend of mine). Sooner or later things are gonna change, I can feel it.
Maybe there will be another incident of the Seigenthaler calibre that changes everyone's perspective on this. Or maybe the community will change itself enough (consider David Gerard's aphorisms about tenure in online communities) to consider this more open-mindedly, rather than digging their heels into whatever material paves Wikipedia's surface at any given time (or more tacitly, accepting the status quo as a destination rather than the forgettable stepping stone that it is).
Maybe somebody will develop of a completely different software extension which facilitates quality control from a yet unforeseen angle that would make flaggedrevs obsolete whether we're using it or not. Maybe the community will be willing to actually discover whether or not it works rather than waving their hands in dissent toward any new idea proffered.
Or maybe there will just be a combination of little things which slowly but surely convince us that our current strategy isn't working well enough, that it's time to open up some windows, to try something different only because there is little left to lose. Maybe Jimbo will go Neville Flynn on us.
Until then we can only hope.
—C.W.