[Foundation-l] Discussion duration and the SOPA shutdown

David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 09:17:17 UTC 2012


On 19 January 2012 02:27, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> It sounds like the Foundation was more organized about it than the
> community, and didn't reach out to push early enough.  I understand
> the desire not to be seen to be leading the community around, but it
> seems to have led to a counterproductively late push (from my point,
> of lack of community discussion time).  Given the depth of Foundation
> internal discussions, perhaps it should have been earlier, at least in
> a "heads-up" sense asking for the community to start prepping / get
> more result-focused.


I'm really not sure it would have made any difference. The Wikipedia
community will fiddle around the edges of an issue *forever*. If you
say to a bunch of Wikipedians "the sky is blue", they'll come back
with a hundred pages of referenced counterexamples. The key skill to
being a Wikipedia editor appears to be generalised cross-domain
bikeshedding.

What absolutely amazes me about this whole thing is that several
hundred Wikipedians largely agreed on *anything at all*.


- d.




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