[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Sarah]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 16:45, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> Sarah wrote:
>> What is the problem with allowing editors to do this kind of thing
>> manually -- open AfDs and RfCs, and the like? Why does there always
>> have to be a template, just as a matter of interest?
>
> Well, you hit the answer to your second question in your second paragraph:
> templates have been implemented largely to appease bots/scripts and to make
> the processes (and their related pages) more standardized and consistent. I
> think templates make much more sense in the context of something like speedy
> deletions: you want a consistent banner that auto-categorizes the page so
> that admins can review the queue later.
>
I wish we could introduce a rule that, whenever a process like this is
automated, a manual way of doing it has to be allowed to co-exist.
Consistency is good, but so are other things, like sanity.

We used to be able to file an article RfC manually, but now as I said
if you try to add one to the page yourself, the bot reverts you. It
would be a trivial matter to stop that from happening, but there's no
will. Bots rule. :)

And RfC is one of the simpler processes (except when the bot isn't
working, in which case everyone's stuck). But there are processes that
really are impenetrable. Try opening a sockpuppet report.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/SPI/Guidance#How_to_open_an_investigation

Sarah