Wikipedia:Tasering
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TASERING stands for Talking about Simple English Really Is Not Grueling. The English Wikipedia has a lot of regular contributors, and a new discussion, if it is started in the right place, can get comments from others in minutes. But Simple English Wikipedia is a very tiny wiki, and a very small community in comparison, with a lot less regular contributors. Because of this, discussions can get ignored for months (look at this poor post, for example). So the main idea of this rule is this: if you see a poor discussion all alone that nobody wants to play with, post a comment! We all know that typing can take a heck of a lot out of you sometimes, but if you have something to say on the matter, don't let the discussion suffer because of your laziness. Many brilliant ideas that could really improve this project are being ignored.
Reasons for pretending to care change
- You don't get auto-TASERed by the new "auto-taser every user that hasn't responded" feature
- Consensus is the oil that this Wikipedia machine lives on, and more comments makes gaining it more likely
How TASERING was born change
Some regular Simple English Wikipedia contributors who frequent the Simple English Wikipedia IRC channel were discussing stuff, as you do, and one of your friendly local bureaucrats hit on the idea of automatically triggering electroshock weapons on all contributors who haven't responded to a discussion, possibly with a MediaWiki extension. Another editor then suggested that this idea be formalised as policy, thus WP:TASERING was born. Of course, this brought the question of what it should stand for. After many rounds of ideas and flicking through cheap dictionaries, "Talking about Simple English Really Is Not Grueling" was born.