User:Daniel Carrero/Quotes

Beer parlour archive/2011/November

 * You, Troy, and Purplebackpack89 want things done here the way they are done on Wikipedia. But English Wikipedia has some 2000 admins and many thousands more regular editors and rollbackers. Here, we have only a tiny handful, maybe 25 or 30, active admins, and not many more regular editors. Yet we have almost as many pages to worry about as English Wikipedia does. Also, Wikipedia pages can take many different forms and formatting is free and easy. We rely on a lot of bots and templates here that require our pages to have fairly specific formatting, and bad formatting causes a lot of problems.
 * Our tiny crew generally does not have time to "fix" badly made entries, so we either leave them a mess or we delete them. We think it is better to delete them than to leave them in such bad shape that we have to field complaints and questions about them, and to keep them from flooding our watch pages with errors. There is no way to make Wiktionary like Wikipedia unless you persuade the thousands of Wikipedia admins and editors to help out here on a regular basis. But you won’t be able to do that because most of them are not interested in this kind of work. —Stephen (Talk) 08:29, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

User talk:Eclecticology
I have written a rather long response, which I am unsure is a good thing, but neither am I sure it is a bad thing. Even then I have left large parts of your response uncommented. Maybe futher cuts in my response would be in order.

Re: importance of image position and "That the image position position matters to you does not mean that it matteers in any absolute sense. I mostly would never notice it": Some people have such type of cognition that they do not notice disunities and minor deviations such as wrongly positioned images. Other people have such type of cognition that their attention is disturbed by each page using a different convention for placement of images. The former type has IMHO no business in blocking efforts of the latter type in reaching an agreement. From your comments, it seems that you are of the former type, and that you are blocking efforts of the latter type to achieve agreement, also by asserting that "polls are evil". If a subject really does not matter to you, you should not be opposing proposals for unification.

Unifying the positions of images after a discussion and a follow-up vote is not a "tyrrany of the majority"; it is a reign of majority also known as democracy. Oligarchs are all too eager to speak of "tyrrany of the majority" so they can continue their reign of a small minority. Wiktionary even has a brake against the rule of mere majority by requiring supermajority. But even supermajority can be unjust. There is not a single method of government that is guaranteed to be just. However, supermajoritarian democracy fares well in comparison with other methods.

Re: "It may then take a couple years to achieve what you want, but it would happen without the divisiveness of a formal vote.": The disagreement about the use of boldface in image captions is already there even before someone ponders to start a vote, as attested by the reverting edits in the mainspace. Where is your evidence that it was only after the formal vote that disagreement occured? Why is it that the disagreement in the main namespace was "nondivisive" while the formal vote was "divisive"?

There is absolutely no evidence that formatting disunities can be resolved without polls and votes in finite time. If you can state examples in Wiktionary, please do so, so I can look at them and see how the unity was achieved. Otherwise, in the absence of evidence pointing otherwise, I surmise that formatting disunities do not converge at all, unless some oligarch resolves them by claiming that "the community has decided".

Re: "I suppose someone who cared could rummage through the archives and find it": No rummaging is needed at all. I have updated the link in the vote. The archiving structure of BP discussions make it very easy to find a discussion if you know the year and the month. There is also a search button at the top of Beer parlour, into which you can enter "Bolding letters in initialisms" and which finds you the discussion in a sec.

Re: "The voted text does not say that anyone other than the eight supporters would be prevented from bolding": The voted text says this: "Voting on: Whether, within the definitions line of initialisms, the first letters of the initialed phrase should be bold or not". It clearly refers to Wiktionary rather than to the eight voters. There are no votes in Wiktionary that somehow per default only govern those who have taken part on the vote.

Re: "What happens when they do? Are their reasons respected?" What do you mean by "are their reasons respected"? What is it for a person to respect reasons of another person? If people want to start using boldface in spite of the result of the vote, they have to start a discussion, in which they will have the opportunity to convince editors that their reasons are right. If they fail to convince other editors, then their reasons have no bearing on further practice. Right or wrong, reasons have only bearing on practice to the extent to which they succeed in convincing other people.

Re: "Or will there be a closed vote = closed mind expression of group think:" I am not sure I understand what you mean by that; it reads like some sort of poetic or figurative expression rather than plain language. The results of the vote can be overriden by another vote. If someone comes with new reasons, he may try to sell the reasons in Beer parlour. The existence of the vote alone does not guarantee that people in Beer parlour are going to be ignoring the person, thus having "closed mind". However, the person still has to sell the reasons. I do not know what you mean by "group think". I have found this in WP: "Groupthink is a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas". In Beer parlour and in votes, I have seen people freely exchanging ideas rather than staying silent in order to minimize conflict. If you would be willing to rephrase that question in plain English that facilitates clear thought, I may try to give a more specific answer without needing to guess. (Unless it was just a rhetorical question that does not seek to be answered.)

Re: "Maybe the person has a legitimate reason for bolding in those particular circumstances. Will he have to run the gauntlet of those people who argue that everything was settled with the vote?" If the person has legitimate reasons, the person can try to sell them in Beer parlour, which may lead to a new vote.

Again, sorry for the long response, and thank you for your attention.

--Dan Polansky 10:03, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions
Wikipedia is not a system of laws. Deletion processes are discussions, not votes, and we encourage people to put forward their opinions. Sometimes, they will find an existing project page which sums up their reasoning already, and rather than reinventing the wheel they will link to it (with a suitable explanation of why it applies). If someone links to an essay or guideline, they are not suggesting "WP:EXAMPLE says we should do this", but rather "I believe we should do this, WP:EXAMPLE explains the reasons why".