[Talk-GB] Discussion of Mechanical Edits

[Andy Allan]

On 18 December 2014 at 11:30, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:
> I personally feel the current discussion is now thrashing.

I personally feel that the opposition to Matthijs' work is becoming
farcical. After setting up dozens of hoops for him to jump through,
which he has done, and then because he managed that creating more and
more, it's now in the position where people are proposing keeping
demonstrably incorrect data in the database for no coherent reason.
Moreover, despite all common sense showing that it never actually
happens, we're expecting other people to spend their free time on
meaningless, brainless drudge-work in order to fix simple typos by
hand, in some kind of "well this sainsbury's might not actually have
an apostrophe maybe it fell off the wall or something" nonsense. "Oh
boy, I'm sure glad that all these typos are there for me to fix by
hand! That's the /best/ use of my free time, it's /such/ fun."

This mailing list appears to be having some sort of immune-response
over-reaction. We don't like mechanical edits in general. Fine.
Therefore every mechanical edit must be fought against, to the bitter
end. That's an over-reaction.

> No-one seems to dispute that we do not have a consensus, Can we leave it at
> that "we agree to disagree". It is usual in such cases to keep the status
> quo ante.

No, that can't work any more. If we're going to build a successful
community here in the UK then we need to cope with thousands of people
having their own opinion, not just "no consensus" among a few dozen
people on this list. Having every sensible plan derailed by
"noticeable opposition" is not a scalable policy either. This concept
of regional "opt-outs" is also badly thought through, since nobody is
"in charge" of a particular area (no matter how much they might strut
around on the lists) and encouraging people to self-appoint as having
area-based vetoes builds the opposite of the community that we're
trying to build.

I'd like to encourage everyone to step back, and think of a better way
to organize ourselves. This isn't it.

Thanks,
Andy