On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:39 PM, FT2 <ft2.w...@gmail.com> wrote: > It's worth pointing out the discussion was open from 15 December to 16 > January before any close.
No, there was informal discussion going back into December. "The discussion" - the concrete, date-attached specific policy and implementation proposals and so forth - was about 3 days worth. People talking about it and bandying informal ideas around for a month doesn't make it a formal consensus discussion. That having happened is why anyone reasonable here should be starting from the point that the sense of the community was correctly identified through all this, which I don't dispute. But bare sense of the community is mob rule. Wikipedia is not a majority-rules, snap decisions mob, despite occasional resemblance thereof. It is not well served when community leaders treat it as such, or the Foundation acts in a manner to encourage that behavior. That way lies even more madness and despair, and a break with a lot of currently very carefully (if badly) balanced precedent and informal process. I don't believe the decision was *wrong* - But a poorly made decision that's right can set a behavioral and decisionmaking precedent that is in its own way far worse than having made a wrong decision. There are a whole raft of nuanced issues that were bulldozed in all of this, ranging from the wisdom of WMF / Wikipedia taking political stands organizationally, to lack of sufficient consideration for the invisible third leg of the stool (the readers / userbase), to rapidity of decisionmaking, to aspects of the community majority bullying those who for some reason opposed the change. Again - the decision wasn't *wrong*. I certainly oppose SOPA, understand why other organizations blacked out and WMF and the community sought to do so here. SOPA is wrong on more political, policy, and technical levels than I can conveniently count in one email. But it can be wrong, and WMF could potentially be wrong to engage in the advocacy action. It can be wrong, and the community can damage itself significantly in making snap decisions on objecting to SOPA. It can be wrong enough, apparently, to convince its opponents that opposing it is enough to justify bulldozing the usual Wikipedia community process. If people wanted this badly to do it, the actual solid RFC should have been going in late December or first week of January. Eventually, procrastinating precludes reasonable responsible action. It does not appear to have prevented effective or community supported action, in the end, but the reasonableness and responsibleness of the process is the issue. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
