Re^5: swissprot assignment (effort)

[tye]

I guess you haven't read or don't remember or just don't agree with the justifications I've given around consideration.

I find it misguided to put little effort into the evaluation of whether a node should be reaped or not and then providing the careful justification while expecting that the people who vote on the consideration will be the ones who put the effort into careful evaluation.

When presented with a consideration to vote on, it is my experience that the person voting is likely to put less effort into analysis.

Take the root of this very thread. As I wrote my prior reply, I voted "keep" on the root node and found that everybody to that point had voted "reap", as instructed to do by your "consideration" (that lacked any justification). It was more than half way to being reaped.

Looking just now, twice as many have since voted, 100% of which were for "keep".

So, the number of people who managed to consider your proposal and decide to go against it was exactly one: me. The number of people who considered my reply and decided to go against it: zero.

The responsibility to make a determination that action is required must fall upon the person proposing the action.

but for edge cases like this

If you consider it an edge case, then you don't feel strongly that it should be reaped, therefore you should not have requested that it be reaped. If nobody finds it clear that it really should be reaped, then it shouldn't be reaped.

If you request that it be reaped, then (experience shows that) it will usually not be hard to find 5 people who will manage to go along with your request. And experience confirms that for this thread. That nearly happened here. This despite there being several people who feel that the thread should not be reaped, and (now) twice as many voting "keep" as "reap".

No trial balloons! Only consider a node if you feel strongly that your proposed action needs to be done.

[Argel]

The node itself is visible on the Nodes to Consider page so I'm not seeing a huge issue here. And just because I consider it to be an edge case for The Monastery does not mean it is an edge case for me. There is still nothing compelling about the OP (heck, technically, it does not even even mention Perl), beyond some of the discussion it has sparked. Anyway, it's 6-4 (Keep-Reap) (and yes, I am one of the Reap votes) last I checked, so sounds like it is safe. Ye of little faith!! :)

[tye]

Anyway, it's 6-4 (Keep-Reap) (and yes, I am one of the Reap votes) last I checked, so sounds like it is safe. Ye of little faith!! :)

Well, if you just want to ignore what I said about what I observed with regard to the voting just for this case, then I guess I should have no reason to expect you to pay attention to my conclusions derived from many such observations over the years. Much less expect some kind of thoughtful countering of my conclusions that might lead to refinement of policy. *sigh*

[Argel]

Sorry tye, do not have a lot of time to write currently. With that said, if it is so easy to get 5 votes, then why did the OP survive the Consideration? Just a hypothesis, but what if specifying a reason to reap a node results in less due diligence on the part of the voters than leaving a reason out? That is, that voters may take a longer/closer look if less info is given, vs. a cursory "spot check" when a reason is given. Anyway, just a thought.

[Argel]

The more I think about it, the more accurate I think I was in Re^8: swissprot assignment (effort) (i.e. less due diligence when a reason is given). Especially for Nodes To Consider, where drilling down to perform due diligence is discouraged by the slowness of the site. I lost interest in Nodes to Consider several years ago because many successful edit considerations to fix typos, re-title, restore contents of a node, etc. were never followed with the actual edit. No doubt because of the small number of members with the privileges to edit someone else's node (understandable since they are volunteers). As a side note, the jargon used is not exactly intuitive to new users either, though when I brought that up several years ago there was little interest in changing that.

It might be useful to split "edit" into "move" and "edit", and maybe have a different consideration page for the edits or create a preference setting to show edit considerations or not. This would reduce Nodes to Consider to those that are actionable, which might increase interest -- i.e. less clutter and one's vote matters more. This assumes that e.g. move votes are automated in some way (maybe require 5 votes). That is, that a successful consideration is always carried out.

For actual edits, you could open it up to more monks. Though to prevent abuse, there would have to be a review process, e.g. randomly pick a few edited nodes, show the before and after, and let monks vote on whether the edits were good or not.

Unfortunately, Consideration is in some ways broken just because of the disincentives (slow site, successful edit considerations are not always acted upon) and I am not sure how much can realistically be done about that. :(