Thread:User talk:Kephir/ it-noun/reply (2)

> As far as I understand it, there is one regular editor of Italian, and he agreed to the change. In fact, he was the initiator of the idea.

As far as I understand it, there are multiple regular editors of Italian, and none of them was the initiator of the idea (not that it really matters, IMHO, whose idea it was). (From the links that CodeCat sent me, she made the proposal on SemperBlotto's talk-page, and he replied "Do whatever you think is best. I'll adjust the bot accordingly", referring to a bot of his own that was affected by CodeCat's changes.)

I think the problem on Wikipedia is that not they have some notion of consensus-gathering, but that they have complex and overly-bureaucratic processes. (When applying to become an admin there, for example, there's a series of essay questions you're supposed to answer, things like "Have other users ever caused you stress?", and while they're technically not required, you obviously won't get adminship if you don't do it; whereas here you just list your timezone and Babel information, and if you forget or would rather not, that's unlikely to have much impact on the vote.)

But honestly? If all (or almost all) of CodeCat's unilateral mass-actions were good ones that everyone agreed with, and the problem was just a shortage of explicit consensus-gathering, then I think we'd be having a somewhat different conversation. Because we're not Wikipedia — because we all know each other — it naturally happens that people develop reputations here for their actions here, and then they have to live with the consequences of that. In the past few months, I've gotten multiple e-mails from different editors complaining about her unilateral actions that they disagreed with, saying things like "I don't trust her judgment", and complaining about not being aware of her actions in time to object (or of having her ignore their objections). As a result, I think it's necessary to be particularly strict in making sure she makes at least a minimal effort to gather consensus beforehand. It's not reasonable or fair to require that everyone else monitor her edits and speak up only if we notice something bad.

By "generalist" I mean, as opposed to a "specialist" mirror/tool that's specifically focused on Italian, so is willing to put in the effort to duplicate the logic in our Italian entries. I'm aware that the Lua modules are freely available, but making use of this is easier said than done. I think the only way a generalist mirror could feasibly support this sort of content is to actually be running a MediaWiki instance at the same version with all the same extensions installed, using database dumps to populate its MediaWiki database and so on, and then just disabling editing. All of that wouldn't ideally be necessary; for example, if someone wanted to create an smartphone app using our content, we'd ideally want that to be pretty easy, and require little template-specific coding. But we're already way past the point where that would be possible, so I wouldn't object to any specific project on that basis.