On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:39 AM, Carcharoth <carcharot...@googlemail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 12:04 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> On 17 January 2012 11:29, Andrew Gray <andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk> wrote: >>> The one omission there other than the mailing list seems to have been >>> the Village Pumps; the first RFC was hosted on VP/Proposals, but >>> spamming a notice for the second RFC to the others might have been >>> worthwhile. Something to add to the list for next time we have some >>> mass short-notice discussion like this - though, hopefully, that won't >>> be for another ten years! >> >> Really, if it's on Central Notice, it doesn't need to be anywhere >> else. It was a little difficult to miss. > > The problem I have is with the timescale. I was away that weekend > (though I was briefly active on Commons, I didn't have time to check > much else). I had no time to look at the discussion when it opened on > Friday, and by the time I got back and had time on Monday evening to > look at the discussion, it had closed. A discussion like that should > have been started at least a week before the planned action. Anything > requiring action on a swifter timescale should have been delegated > following (at minimum) a week-long community discussion. > > Ironically, I just tried to look up some comments made in one of the > earlier discussions, but was unable to do so. Shouldn't the > discussions leading up to the blackout have been omitted from the > blackout? I think some were, but not all. If there are some discussion > pages related to this that are still readable (even if not editable), > could someone list them here? > > Carcharoth
I started a thread along these lines a few hours ago on foundation-l. More specifically focused on the Foundation role in catalyzing it (going from an unfocused small on-wiki discussion to a "We should really do this" within 5 days of the proposed initiation date), but touching generally on insufficient time for proper discussion and consensus. On the plus side, I think a majority of active Wikipedians seem to have been heard, and the consensus was clearly there. On the minus side, for a "big thing", we need time to frame things. Time to define what arguments people think there are to be made, what the big options are, how to present them. Once the idea is proposed and framed, then there needs to be time for consensus discussions. For something as big as a day of Dark, probably a week. And then time for counting it up, calling a consensus, and implementing. Two weeks would be rushing it, from beginning to end. We had approximately 5 days. I don't suspect that spending the appropriate amount of time here would have changed things regarding community decision and ultimate outcome. However, it is not appropriate to cut corners in this manner. There's a fundamental difference between a Community Consensus and a Mob. 72 hrs over a weekend is somewhere in between, and uncomfortably on the Wrong End of that scale. This entirely seems to have been timing, the community sort of deciding it was a good idea without proper wide consensus-seeking in late December through the 12th, followed by the Foundation deciding it was a good idea and pushing for an on-wiki consensus process roughly on the 13th. Someone - I still haven't entirely figured out who from reading all the threads - called a 72 hr time limit on it all arbitrarily around late 13th or early 14th. The earlier on-wiki planners could perhaps have started a better onwiki process with enough discussion and notice. The Foundation could have rethought engaging given the date date, but appears to have decided that the issue was important enough to push on through (overlooking the consensus timing issues). Nobody is "at fault" here, but a bunch of people in positions to try and be proactive weren't and a bunch of community leaders jumped to the front of it rather than being a little cautious. I don't like SOPA any more than anyone else here I can think of. But a lot of nuance - for Wikipedia's long term reputation and otherwise - was lost or bulled through in this process. Doubleplus ungood. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
