On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Erik Moeller <[email protected]> wrote: >>> and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on >>> participation. >> Please help me understand the implications of this statement. > > It simply means that > > a) we want to make sure that for the production roll-out, the user > interface is not insane and appropriate to the specific en.wp > configuration that's been proposed;
Aren't our volunteers qualified to contribute to this? > b) we'll want to track participation metrics after the roll-out to see > what the impact of this technology is. I'm not sure what after the fact analysis has to do with the deployment schedule. > Accusations of "obstructionism" don't help; I understand where these > come from, but it's a massive case of assume bad faith. Please stop > it. "Bad faith" — I don't think those words means what you think they mean. I don't think anyone at the WMF is acting in bad faith. Surely if you intended to harm Wiki(p|m)edia you could come up with something better than this. My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki that there simply hasn't been time to even make a simple configuration change; ghat WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project, or that the WMF staff has decided that it knows better than hundreds of contributors and that it needed to act paternalistic and protect the community against its own decision by ignoring it. I am not the only person to harbor these concerns, for example see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions&diff=316628512&oldid=316625478 . All off of these can be supported by the facts in front of me; None of them reflect very positively on Wikimedia's staff, but neither require even an ounce of bad faith. If "assume good faith" has become a code-word for "pretend everything is done perfectly; ignore problems; provide no criticism" then it's an aspect of our culture that needs to be eliminated. I felt the latter hypothesis was supported by your statement that "we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation". Even with your clarification I can't help but understand that when I ask 'Why is FOO being delayed' and you respond (in part) 'Because we are concerned that it will harm things' that you aren't saying that you're intending to obstruct the deployment... Extracting the purest (strawman?) form of statement: "It has not been done yet, in part, because we think what the community decided may harm participation. However, we aren't working with the community to ameliorate this harm" is pretty much the definition of obstruction. This is precisely the thing I was talking about when I said that I'm concerned that Wikimedia is treating the contributors as 'users' rather than partners: If there are concerns about negative side-effects of an initiative with a partner, you talk them out and find solutions, you don't drag your feet on implementing and hope the demand goes away— though some organizations find that to be an acceptable approach to handling needy customers. If Wikimedia were more communicative about limitations and timelines and more responsive to requests there wouldn't be as much need or room to speculate. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
