[OLPC library] Things I would like taken away from the wiki: Sign-up lists

[Seth Woodworth]

There are few policies that we've been implementing from time to time on the
wiki that I would like to see go away.  It's my belief that these policies
are hard to maintain, ill-scalable, and unsupportable as-is.  I suggest that
we retire the following:

== Sign up lists ==
* Lists where people are encouraged to sign up to do a task or contribute to
a given project.

There are several projects and pages that suggest that you sign-up to help
do '$variable'.  There are several problems with this idea.

There is no automatic mechanism in place to communicate to users who sign up
on a list.  If I wanted to send a message to this list, I would have to wade
through User_talk: pages and communicate with each person individually each
time I want to make an announcement.  This is compounded by the fact that
many users don't sign the page or add a link to their user page, and merely
type their names.

What's more is that when users see a list of people who are supposedly
participating on a '$variable' they are less inclined to join than a project
with few visible members.

I feel that a projects should have open task lists or joining a list or some
other mechanism than a sign up list.  Alternatively, if someone were to
create a bot or tool that makes this ad-hoc list broadcasting function
(including making sure people are notified via email), I would be ecstatic.

I think that the solution is to remove these lists and any mentions to them,
contacting people on a case-by-case basis.  In the future the creation of
these lists should be discouraged.
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