Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Delegable proxy/Table

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep, although it is a completely rejected proposal, there is lack of real need to delete these pages, as these pages does not contain any libel contents, copyvio, or anything that's going against the policy. 山本一郎 (会話) 04:46, 15 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Delegable proxy/Table

This is related to Wikipedia:Delegable proxy, a proposal that has been very soundly rejected, and might be deleted (see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Delegable proxy and Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2008 February 29#Wikipedia:Delegable proxy.) This page (and the many others listed below) does not describe the proposal, but consists of the technology designed to implement it. Since this proposal has been so completely rejected, there is no need for these to remain, and their existence (and advocacy for their use) was the substance of the proposal that has been rejected. Hence, we should delete them all. Mangojuicetalk 02:37, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Also included:

Mangojuicetalk 02:43, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. But this is an independent MfD, which is weird in my view. If the main is not deleted, what is your vote?=--
talk) 07:27, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
Speedy Keep vote was process, and was correct at that time. This MfD was redundant. It's been changed to Delete. As to off-site promotion, these files are irrelevant, actually. They represented a first stab at implementation and were really not right, for reasons that this whole affair made clear. As the project page explicitly stated (though I think the tag has been removed), this was an experiment, and part of the experiment was to see how the community would react to the idea. We did not really know. It was always possible that people would actually read it and try to understand it. You never can tell, AGF and all that, and sometimes opinions change. The experiment was successful. Thanks to all who participated.--
talk) 18:23, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
Such rampant rudeness. For one thing, this will go to meta, probably. Try deleting it there! For another, we do have a MediaWiki installation pending. For another, we do have copies of all the files off-wiki, we are not stupid, and, finally, next time something like this is proposed here, there will be a support base, which we deliberately avoided creating this time. Oh, and, yes. It won't be me proposing it, nor, I suspect, Absidy. There are some basic principles that those who wish to understand Wikipedia and where it is going might study. Questions answered, hopefully promptly. Otherwise go back to sleep. It's all in good hands.--
talk) 18:15, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
  • Delete well put by Mangojuice - I concur.--VS talk 02:08, 2 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep.
    Consensus can change
    , so uselessness for policy implementation now is not a guarantee of such uselessness later. Moreover, the table is an illustration of the proposal and as such is an integral part of it. As the prereqs note:
The example given in the prereq ("proposal to reject proposal foo") suggests a kind of inherent disruptiveness not shared by this proposal.
If I understand correctly, since this is not a vote, action will be decided based on the strength of arguments and the correct application of policy. Policy outweighs even a consensus reached here, since the policy reflects a larger consensus. So unless someone can show that the table stuff is disruptive or not part of the proposal, it probably should stay. The exception would be if someone could show that having the tables here somehow hinders the development of a free encyclopedia. Does it? If so, how? Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 22:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For clarity, it should be noted that Obuibo Mbstpo (as Absidy, and a variety of other account names) was the original proponent of the Delegable proxy proposal, and came within a hair's breadth of being permanently banned for his activities to promote it. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 23:14, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's true. Is that an argument for deleting the table, or did you just want to point that out for the closer's benefit, so they wouldn't think this is some unrelated user? Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 02:12, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The actual table and the templates are not needed (or even especially helpful) to illustrate the idea, they're the implementation of the idea. I think the proposal can be summed up neatly in one paragraph, for instance

Delegable proxy was a proposal to allow users to specify a proxy authorized to speak for them in debates they did not participate in directly, and furthermore, to allow proxies to delegate further proxies, and so on. It was rejected strongly by the community, even in an advisory, experimental form. See the page history for more details.

That is all that needs to be preserved of this proposal, perhaps plus a couple "see also" links to related topics. Mangojuicetalk 03:13, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That was not the proposal. Period. This is the core of the problem here, which is that Mangojuice never did understand the proposal (and that those who proposed its deletion repeated variations of the same misunderstanding, and that others, in fact, appear to have believed it, in spite of repeated denials that this was the proposal.
talk) 03:55, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
Well yes, the only reason I call it a "proposal" at this point is that our policy doesn't seem to contemplate this type of animal. What is it? An essay? We don't really have a strong culture of experimentation here, at least not on a formal basis. Care to rewrite
WP:PRX to reflect what it really is? Should we even bother on this wiki? Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 04:52, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
It needs to remain {{
WP:PRX more concise, I'll see you at the talk page. Mangojuicetalk 06:19, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
I thank Mangojuice for continuing this discussion on my Talk page, where anyone else interested may see it. Yes, the idea can be summarized very succinctly. That was actually done with the proposal, ultimately, but it got lost in the noise. Note that the result of the MfD does not technically represent a rejection of the idea, and, in fact, the MfD failed, it wasn't deleted. Whenever you present two questions at once, you've got a problem with interpreting the results. Keep/Delete is one result, and Firmly and Permanently Reject/Leave to Future Consensus is another. The fact is that the former is never done, though attempts are made to do it (the only thing worse than doing something foolish is tying yourself up so that you can't do something foolish). So, in any case, we can, in Talk for
talk) 18:00, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
  • We got rid of all of
    WP:AMA board when those were rejected. Why not here? Mangojuicetalk 13:11, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
    ]
Glad you asked. Because that was a bad idea? If the community makes a mistake, should it repeat it? It was a bad idea because it is now much more difficult to understand what Esperanza and AMA actually were, and, to the extent that they were mistakes -- and they were --, not to repeat those mistakes. Indeed, part of the problem now is that those fiascos were not fully documented, that much of the history is actually lost to non-admins and maybe to everyone if it has been fully deleted by developers. A huge amount of editor labor went into those structures. What has been going on is, from my point of view, the "tyranny of democracy," specifically of direct anarchic democracy, which, when the scale gets large, develops an oligarchy through participation bias. It's all predictable. A majority, in this case a supermajority of those participating, sometimes led by demagogues who deceive them, decides that a voluntary association of members for some purpose that does not itself violate policy, is to be prohibited. (If those projects violated policy, it wasn't documented. The usual argument was that it was a "waste of time." Back to work, slaves! No talking! Of course, we aren't slaves, and those who are so commanded may just go away quietly, back to their boring, off-wiki doom.) Wikipedia uses "consensus" in a non-standard way, and it confuses the hell out of people with experience in consensus process, at first. Consensus process usually seeks full consensus. It may have mechanisms for making decisions short of that, but those are considered the exceptions, and disruptive, only to be allowed if the majority considers it an immediate necessity. Basically, Wikipedia is an experiment along the same lines as others which have come before. If you look back, nearly all of these experiments ended with failure, even when fantastically successful at first, except a few found traditions that allowed them to remain coherent for a long time, and Alcoholics Anonymous is one of these. The basic "traditions" which function in AA are actually very much like the Wikipedia guidelines, with some notable exceptions, and it is these exceptions that will kill Wikipedia if they are not addressed. Because Wikipedia is still in a growth phase, the spreading cancer isn't visible, it seems like the project is successful. This has all happened before. Wikipedia is accumulating large reservoirs of burned-out editors and general public disillusioned with the idea, at the same time as very many are discovering it and saying, "What a great idea!" From my analysis, the collapse will come quite rapidly, a surprise to most of us.
Now, as to the files. They aren't important, deleting them as far as I'm concerned, in itself, is harmless. I believe I have copies of them in any case. Far more energy has been wasted trying to delete them than would be wasted in some imaginary future disruption that depends on them. With others above, I ask, "What's the fear?" Mangojuice did not answer that. His answer was essentially, "We did it before, so we should do it now." If this is a precedent, shouldn't it be a guideline? Is there a guideline that suggests "Don't do X," where X is the actual problem with
talk) 14:02, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
To Manjojuice, I was actually thinking of Esperanza when I wrote that, because even then I thought it was very silly and paranoid that people felt the need to delete so much. Granted I don't feel strongly about this situation, or the pages that were deleted from EA, but my general feeling is to document this rather different idea. -- Ned Scott 04:42, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
And only some of the EA subpages were completely deleted. A lot were just made into protected redirects. -- Ned Scott 04:44, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think in some cases, people use the deletion process to further a "political" objective of making sure that the decision to shut down something is less easily reversible. After all, it's harder to argue about something that you can't even see. Was it really necessary to delete the
Esperanza Charter? Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 16:25, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
]
probably not. -- Ned Scott 23:55, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Clearly marked as an inactive page, yet important to maintain understanding of what the policy would have been so that it can be improved upon or avoided in the future. - Chardish (talk) 21:20, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment The funny thing is, Abd struck out his keep vote because he could see the counterproductive nature of the efforts to delete it. If this page remains here as "rejected," there's a chance that if something remotely similar is proposed, someone may point to it and say "Hey, we already rejected that!" But if it's deleted, the whole matter becomes more nebulous, especially as time passes, there's turnover of editors, etc. We already know that in the short term, this type of delegable proxy is not going to happen; that's true whether we delete the page or not. So the only pertinence this really has is for the long term. However, I'm really not sure whether keeping or deleting will benefit the cause more, and therefore am voting to keep mostly because I created these pages and
    WP:ILIKEIT. Also, they might be useful if people want to borrow some of the technical concepts for completely unrelated purposes. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 21:35, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Not at all. The EA pages that were deleted were targeted because of the bureaucracy tied to them. These pages are parts of a template system, not the actual organization of a group of editors. -- Ned Scott 23:50, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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