We need to keep in mind that the people who are vocal on mailing lists, or who participate in on-wiki polls with 50 or 100 participants, represent only a tiny fraction of all Wikimedia users - even only a small fraction of those who are active and registered. Yet the constituency of the WMF must be all present users, as well as everyone who might become a user in the future.
The Foundation can't surrender to the inertia and change-resistance of long-term editors, because this serves the bulk of its constituency quite poorly. I understand why Todd thinks the WMF should only rarely override the community, and in some respects I agree. But MediaWiki and the user interface are the WMF's core product, and a small minority of vocal resistance should not be the deciding factor in rolling out new features. That said, the statistics referred to in another thread by James Salsman and Robert Rohde are troubling and deserve serious attention by Erik and the product team. Those combined with the negative reaction of vocal long-term users should be a big red flag that the team needs to begin communicating much more clearly and being much more (visibly) attentive to potential problems. It boggles my mind, to be honest, that the WMF continues to run into these PR crises without having thought through deeply engaging communication plans and feedback loops. ~Nathan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>