[WikiEN-l] Time to reboot wikien-l

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com>:

> I'm not saying the solution is to walk away from things you care
> about.  But the BADSITES issue clearly will not die; we've got
> people on both sides who haven't budged an inch in their positions
> (myself included) and who are apparently willing to trot out the
> same arguments in endless repetetition until the cows come home.
> We've all got to get off that treadmill somehow.

Well, I don't know about that. My view on BADSITES has changed at least. I
started out very much in favor of some variant of BADSITES, but as I watched
the arguments develop I became more and more convinced that BADSITES was a bad
idea both ideological and pragmatically (there may have been some belief
overkill on my part). What we really have is a much more serious problem- not
that people won't change their views (it happens occasionally and frankly the
vast majority of humans almost never change their views on almost anything),
the real problem is that we've had in a variety of issues we've had groups of
people who seem to be treating Wikipedia almost as a game of chess, and are
willing to use their superior knowledge of the rules to impose something which
clearly has no consensus. And then, after they get checkmate, they claim they
have a consensus. This isn't productive. We need people to be more 
willing when
there isn't a consensus to say "Hey, I've got a strong opinion this. 
There isn't
a consensus, I'll wait until there is before making broad sweeping policy
claims".