As far as I can tell, there is no consensus whatsoever that this new Table: namespace is wanted or needed.
All I can find is a proposal from *2005* that suggests a complete WYSIWYG table editor which would incidentally make use of a new namespace. This was not advertised to the community, especially not recently, and has certainly not attracted the level of support such a change needs in order to be implemented. This is the first I and pretty much everyone else has heard of the idea.
Leaving the namespace in place is going to cause organizational problems as things which should be in template or article space end up there while there is no agreement on what the namespace should be used for or how it operates.
Please remove it.
Thanks,
Gurch
Gurch:
As far as I can tell, there is no consensus whatsoever that this new Table: namespace is wanted or needed.
at [0] there seemed to be near consensus that using this namespace for something might be useful.
is WP:VP discussion not enough for changing something on enwiki? what is?
- river.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive#Spli...
On 09/05/07, River Tarnell river@attenuate.org wrote:
at [0] there seemed to be near consensus that using this namespace for something might be useful. is WP:VP discussion not enough for changing something on enwiki? what is? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive#Spli...
Asking lots of people in lots of places. 43,000 editors in any given month, 4330 frequent editors in any given month ... en:wp is a big place. Look at the [[WP:ATT]] proposal, which was worked on for months and then when it was finally *released* was the first a lot of people had ever heard of it, and they went "um, no." Local consensus with effects outside the local consensus zone isn't usefully consensus.
Yes, I know this isn't fantastically helpful. Summary of the summary: People are a problem.
- d.
On 5/9/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 09/05/07, River Tarnell river@attenuate.org wrote:
at [0] there seemed to be near consensus that using this namespace for something might be useful. is WP:VP discussion not enough for changing something on enwiki? what is? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive#Spli...
Asking lots of people in lots of places. 43,000 editors in any given month, 4330 frequent editors in any given month ... en:wp is a big place. Look at the [[WP:ATT]] proposal, which was worked on for months and then when it was finally *released* was the first a lot of people had ever heard of it, and they went "um, no." Local consensus with effects outside the local consensus zone isn't usefully consensus.
More directly: many people, even very active users, don't follow many discussions on the village pump, if any at all.
On 5/9/07, River Tarnell river@attenuate.org wrote:
David Gerard:
Local consensus with effects outside the local consensus zone isn't usefully consensus.
okay, so is there a page / policy somewhere that describes what procedure is required to make changes on enwiki?
No.
Kelly
Kelly Martin wrote:
On 5/9/07, River Tarnell river@attenuate.org wrote:
David Gerard:
Local consensus with effects outside the local consensus zone isn't usefully consensus.
okay, so is there a page / policy somewhere that describes what procedure is required to make changes on enwiki?
No.
Kelly
Actually there is. Well, there are several different rather vague pages about different aspects of this, but that's as much as you can hope for in a wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_policy says that http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Village pump_(policy) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Policies are places to get feedback on completely new policies and guidelines, mentioned by - changes to existing policies and guidelines are often discussed on the talk page of that policy/guideline instead of or in addition to the above pages and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy); though I don't know if there's any page that spells this out, pretty much every page for discussion of some kind points you to the Village Pump as the place to propose things. In practise, it's pretty easy to make a global announcement and hence use pretty much any page as the venue of discussion by posting a notice on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal
(Actually *making* changes isn't the problem, it's being sure there is a consensus to do so. If you can tell even without discussion that something is going to be universally welcomed, no harm will come of just going ahead and doing it - but in practise that never happens with anything of a significant size.)
A new namespace requires not only some indication that the namespace itself is both desired and useful, but also changes to existing policies and guidelines anywhere where they are namespace-specific. We currently have no policy on what is and is not acceptable in Table: space, and we currently have no deletion policy for Table: space. I can see polcy and process being copied pretty much wholesale from the equivalent for templates, which is convenient, but that's just my perspective. Others may well disagree, and it's a policy change of a significant size that, "Be bold" or not, it can't just be rushed through at the whim of a few users. This should have been decided upon long before changes went live.
Kelly will probably tell me that all the above is wrong and complete nonsense and she disagrees with it, but then she says that about *everything*.
Anyway, none of this is really relevant to Wikitech-l any longer, and I apologize for going off-topic. (Though it will be a cold day in hell before I post to WikiEN-l again).
-Gurch
River Tarnell wrote:
David Gerard:
Local consensus with effects outside the local consensus zone isn't usefully consensus.
okay, so is there a page / policy somewhere that describes what procedure is required to make changes on enwiki?
The usual procedure for requests for new namespaces is to ignore them until they have overwhelming community support, including a vote.
-- Tim Starling
On 10/05/07, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
River Tarnell wrote:
David Gerard:
Local consensus with effects outside the local consensus zone isn't usefully consensus.
okay, so is there a page / policy somewhere that describes what procedure is required to make changes on enwiki?
The usual procedure for requests for new namespaces is to ignore them until they have overwhelming community support, including a vote.
... because that way it's very unlikely those complaining will be listened to by those complaining about the complaining. Or something.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/05/02/revealed-why-the-community-is-on-c...
Imagine herding 4,000+ cats ...
- d.
Gurch wrote:
As far as I can tell, there is no consensus whatsoever that this new Table: namespace is wanted or needed.
All I can find is a proposal from *2005* that suggests a complete WYSIWYG table editor which would incidentally make use of a new namespace. This was not advertised to the community, especially not recently, and has certainly not attracted the level of support such a change needs in order to be implemented. This is the first I and pretty much everyone else has heard of the idea.
Leaving the namespace in place is going to cause organizational problems as things which should be in template or article space end up there while there is no agreement on what the namespace should be used for or how it operates.
Please remove it.
I've removed the namespace pending further community discussion and a vote. Pages created in that namespace have been silently moved back to the pseudo-namespaces.
-- Tim Starling
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