Delays better than mistakes

(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.

Please do not hurry trying to force your software onto wikis, or your content into articles. There are very few cases where a situation on-wiki truly is an emergency.

Often, where someone tries to break consistency between things, there is a way to please him while retaining the consistency. Think about a compromise.

Edit wars are hurried actions and are redundant, for the reason mentioned above. Again, no sky would fall, were your content absent in an article for a few moments while you're discussing the change at a talk page.

• For instance, in the , closing the RfC was a hurried decision. It could have been advertised in central notice for better sample of folks participating.
• Also, the snippet in question could have been written to only fire for logged out contributors. This would have resolved concerns over not rendering a user preference useless. Instead, DaB. and Raymond engaged into an edit war, with DaB. insisting on the change. This is not in line with the thoughts expressed in this essay. (Whether this could have avoided the escalation or not is another separate question.)
• Similarly, JEissfeldt's usage of undo instead of writing this to only fire for logged out users was a hurried decision. Just undoing edits is not sustainable; one must always think how the goal may be achieved without introducing broken things and misleading content in articles.
• His/her note on talk page, stating that "MV is useful to readers and is a step forward, please do not disable it", was a hurried decision; it should have been better to write that the RfC results are not in agreement with what the surveys showed, and we should wait until the two match or WMF approves of community consencus in the first place. (Even that was redundant; nothing would fall over, were MediaViewer disabled until a community consencus is to enable it.)
• Usage of superprotect was also a hurried decision. Again, nothing would fall over, were MediaViewer disabled until a community consencus is to enable it. Making the snippet work properly and having the wiki sit around without MediaViewer for a couple weeks would not have bitten the readerbase bitterly as a whole. (A relevant central notice may also have been introduced, suggesting that we apologise for missing feature as it is undergoing a re-review.)

Do not panic!