On 23 August 2017 at 05:03, John Mark Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi list members,
The list admins (hereafter 'we', being Austin, Asaf, Shani and I, your
humble narrator) regularly receive complaints about the frequent
posters on this list, as well as about the unpleasant atmosphere some
posters (some of them frequent) create.
It is natural that frequent posters will say specific things that more
frequently annoy other list members, but often the complaints are due
to the volume of messages rather than the content of the messages.
We are floating some suggestions aimed specifically at reducing the
volume, hopefully motivating frequent posters to self-moderate more,
but these proposed limits are actually intending to increasing the
quality of the discourse without heavy subjective moderation.
The first proposal impacts all posters to this list, and the last
three proposals are aimed at providing a more clear framework within
which criticism and whistle-blowing are permitted, but that critics
are prevented from drowning out other discussions. The bandwidth that
will be given to critics should be established in advance, reducing
need to use subjective moderation of the content when a limit to the
volume will often achieve the same result.
...
The RFC is at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/wikimedia-l-post-limits
However please also feel welcome to reply on-list if you wish to
express explicit support or opposition to any of the four proposals
above (please identify them by number, to ease counting). We will
count votes (here and on the meta RFC) after two weeks, and post a
more refined final version back to this mailing list.
The list administrators will default to *enacting* all four proposals,
but will refrain from enacting any proposal receiving more opposition
than support.
--
John Vandenberg
The RFC has yet to be closed, after being open for over five months.
Could someone close it or reject it?
In practical reality, the hardline talk about posting limits, seems to
have resulted in significantly reduced posts to this list. The
statistics are somewhat worrying, casting doubt on the long term
future of this list staying active or interesting.
The standard statistics [1] show participation is at a record low. My
sense of the list is that real content discussions are now minimal,
with announcements and thankspam outnumbering thoughtful observations
or critiques.
Picking out one trend to illustrate, here are comparative numbers for
last month against other Januarys in the last few years, which is a
simple way to compensate for seasonal variation:
2018, 139 posts
2017, 370 posts
2016, 989 posts
2015, 445 posts
2014, 571 posts
Rather than increasing negative bureaucracy on the list to stop people
posting too much, perhaps the list moderators have some views on how
to positively encourage people to engage with the community here?
Links
1.
https://stats.wikimedia.org/mail-lists/wikimedia-l.html
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae