On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'd like
to see a consensus demonstrated that flagged revs would have
been better here because even past proposals to use them strictly as a
replacement for protection have come under fire.
I know... I've never understood that. I'm not sure the people doing
the firing actually understood the proposal.
It's the old "slippery slope" argument.
and my not very charitable take on it:
It's completely valid: I expect that if we roll out flagging as a
replacement for protection, then we'll discover that it isn't evil,
that it doesn't stop contributions, that it doesn't make Wikipedia
stale, and that it improves quality, thus smashing the empty but
compelling arguments being made against it. Or we won't but we'll
come up with something even better to try, sparking a chain of
iterative improvement.
In any case, after rolling it out we will have knowledge, experience,
and measurements which we simply do not today. Those factors will
drive our decisions rather than the fear, speculation, uninformed
laziness, and resistance to change which dominate the discussions
today.
Resistance to change is part of human nature. We shouldn't be shocked
to see it, even when it results in illogical decision making processes
.