Gregory Maxwell wrote:
It's not really my place to talk about papers being written by others, which is why I hadn't answered in more detail.
I just wanted to know who was doing it so that I could follow up on it and simply confirm that the work was being done. Thanks for giving a name, if you're pinging him yourself already I'll wait a little before pestering him with questions myself.
If you don't believe me that people are working on this, feel free to do your own research it's not like you need anyone's permission. If you need help getting data in a convenient form and can clearly articulate what data you need, please contact me... I'll be glad to help.
I don't have the tools or skillset to be doing this sort of research myself, or frankly the time or interest - I'm here on Wikipedia as an editor, all I want to do is edit. I am, however, concerned about the process behind these sorts of changes. I want to be sure that Wikipedia is being run in an open, inclusive manner since that's one of the major reasons I like this place and continue to stick around.
I try to assume good faith, but the long lack of information about this started to make me strongly suspicious that no experiment was intended, Jimbo wasn't interested in the actual impact on editing and just wanted to make an appearance of "doing something" so press releases could be issued to counter the bad PR of the Siegenthaler matter. While countering bad PR is certainly a good and worthy goal, I would rather not have random tempests-in-teapots spawn restrictions on Wikipedia editing with no plan or options for ever repealing them if they turn out to be counterproductive.
Simply having the means to verify that this "experiment" _is_ in fact an experiment, and not just something that had been called an experiment to brush off any complaints that may have been raised over its implementation, goes a long way toward easing my concerns.