On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:00 AM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: > The board resolution specifies a magical flying unicorn pony that > shits rainbows. A wide-ranging survey has been conducted on the > precise flight patterns and the importance of which way round the > rainbow spectrum goes. These tiresome people who keep calling this > "impossible" just do not understand that the high-level decision for a > magical flying unicorn pony that shits rainbows has been set in stone. >
I don't have any unicorns, but there are lots of ponies. I'd be happy to stick a horn on one and call her sparkles if that would help? User rating / categorization systems are like ponies. They are a familiar and commonplace way of organizing things. They can be used to filter some things and reduce the degree of surprise; however they will always have both a large false positive rate and a large false negative rate. No filter is going to fly or shit rainbows. The question is not where to find mythical beasts, but whether dressing up a horse so that it looks a little like a unicorn would actually be useful. And that depends on whether there is actual demand for such filters, and whether having a filter that is sort-of-okay some of the time would be helpful to the people who want filtering. -Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
