Andrew Dunbar wrote:
There's no need to be short-sighted and settle for quick fixes just because they are "a lot easier". I'm sure that's not the kind of thinking employed by the founders of the OED or Websters.
If Wiktionary is a good project, and I'm sure we all believe it is, then it will survive long enough for the real fixes to come along.
This is so typical. This argument is *always* going to brought up for *everything* that is not a complete miracle cure. Hence nothing will ever change and hence we will be stuck with the same problem forever just because people wouldn't accept at least a partial solution!
Cleaning up after the side- effects of the quick fix and cleaning up again in the future when a solid fix comes along will be a pointless drain on the time and patience of the contributors.
That is ungrounded and probably false. What you call a "quick fix" is a step in the right direction. Any "cleaning up" needed to do after the next fix (whether or not it is a miracle cure) will complement, and not override, replace, or render useless, the cleaning up needed now.
Also, going with the quick fix now will reduce our chances of getting the developers to implement a solid fix later on, because they will believe they had already fixed the problem.
You are forgetting that you *already* have no chance of getting a developer to do anything. The only reason why we can do this now is because *the feature is already there*. I don't know why it was written (maybe for Toki Pona?), but we have it now, and we can flip a switch to make it work. I (not really a "developer") have volunteered to write a script to do the moving in order to spare you from 40,000 page moves, but even without that script I am sure the Wiktionary userbase can fix all of that manually over time.
It may be even more unfortunate that some feel the need to put down others rather than improve their arguments or consider that other opinions might be valid and not just the "contrary ignoramuses" who have been depicted in the email I'm replying to now.
I do think I have considered the arguments brought forward. I have thought about them as much as I could, and almost all of them struck me as separate issues that were not arguments against this particular change.
Timwi