[Foundation-l] Recent firing?

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:

>
> I fail to see how this is contrary to the mission of the Wikimedia
> Foundation to "empower and engage people around the world to collect
> and develop educational content under a free license or in the public
> domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally".  I think it
> promotes it, indirectly by making for a more friendly environment if
> not directly by paving the way for real educational content.
>

Yes.  "Making for a more friendly environment" is absolutely relevant to
that mission.

Thomas writes:
> I do know when a discussion is irritating people - they make that very
> clear. What I don't understand is why it irritates them when they
> could so easily ignore it. There are no limits on how many threads we
> can have, so saying there are other more useful discussions is a
> complete non-argument.

This is also about making for a more friendly environment.  To be fair,
technology has backpedaled a bit here.  Many modern mail clients don't
support killing threads, so you have to delete each new message as it comes
along, and have no choice but to read annoying subject headers every time.
[dear gmail: this is ridiculous.]  Both of which make flames or other
deathless threads annoying proportional to their size.

> There are two solutions to this problem -
> people can ignore the threads they aren't interested in at negligible
> cost to themselves, or other people can stop discussing the things
> they are interested it, which is obviously a cost in itself.

This is the heart of the matter.   A number of people have already stopped
discussing the things they are interested in here, or even reading
regularly, because they find this forum too noisy to use.   So it is a
tradeoff between who feels comfortable posting and reading here.

Since this is one of the few cross-foundation channels, as many people as
possible should feel somewhat comfortable here.  And since all channels can
be saturated -- and many people's responses indicate that this one gets
saturated for them by long contentious threads -- either the aggressive
posters or the saturated readers are going to find their preferred use of
the list frustrated.

If you find yourself posting for the fifth or eighth time to a thread,
please consider this tradeoff, and other ways to get your point across.  I
prefer wikiessays (rc is a much harder channel to saturate), but ymmv.

SJ