On 09/05/07, River Tarnell <river(a)attenuate.org> wrote: 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.

David Gerard: okay, so is there a page / policy somewhere that describes what procedure is required to make changes on enwiki? - river.

Kelly Martin wrote: 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

On 10/05/07, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: ... 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-… Imagine herding 4,000+ cats ... - d.