"Aryeh Gregor" Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote in message news:7c2a12e21001191147w16b95226g14a9f8844e0d74de@mail.gmail.com...
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:03 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:26 AM, Happy-melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
Changing things on a whim and then requiring communities to build a consensus **to change them back** is not how we generally approach site configuration.
It is how we do it in my experience. We don't usually consult communities for global feature changes. The default was chosen by dev fiat at some point in the past anyway, so dev fiat may as well be good enough to change it.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to see the monstrous hypocrisy in that compared to the hoops we'd make the communities jump through if they wanted to propose *exactly the same change* from their end. Fiat *is* required when a default is *first chosen*, that's certainly true, and talking to the communities before introducing *new* features is indeed the exception rather than the rule. If Special:UnwatchedPages was a new feature we'd be perfectly free to pick a target usergroup out of a hat. But this is a proposal to change an already existing feature, a configuration change that would be happily LATER'd without a clear consensus from the community in question if it came up the other direction. So I totally disagree: for feature **changes**, we most certainly do look to the communities to take the lead.
--HM