On 09/01/2014 11:45 AM, Todd Allen wrote: > On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 9:10 AM, Marc A. Pelletier <m...@uberbox.org> wrote: > We've heard that before.
Oh, I'm pretty damn sure that the "stick to the timeline" idea isn't going to get traction ever again. :-) But yeah in general recognizing an error is not, in itself, proof against repeating it. Errare humanum est. > I don't think it's that the communities don't want any direction. It's that > large, open projects historically managed by their volunteers are not > amenable to top-down, authoritarian direction. All that will do is start > fights, to the detriment of everyone and especially to the detriment of > said projects. None of us are out a paycheck if we scale back our activity > or walk away in disgust. There's that, but there's also the (unavoidable) issue that Wikipedia was revolutionnary, so it attracted a great deal of people who had little to no desire to abide "The Man". The problem is we /are/ "The Man" now. > That's contradicted by, among other things, ACTRIAL as mentioned above. The > en.wp community came to a clear consensus for a major change, and the WMF > shrugged and said "Nah, rather not." That, IMO, is an example of what I call a shortsighted change. It *might* have been a good local change, in the end, but it nevertheless was a fundamental dent in the project values in order to solve an extremely local problem. If I were the Foundation back then I probably also would have refused to proceed without Licence-change-level consensus and a long consultation process - at the very least. Like or not, the Foundation is in the odd position of being the guardian of the "Big Picture"; local projects are exactly that - local. What may be a good local change may turn out to be globally disastrous (because divergence, precedent, etc). But that's getting into a discussion of federalism as a concept (and whether the projects are de facto federated) which may be interesting in itself but is way waaaay off-topic. :-) > Regardless, same again: That needs to be met with good faith on the other > side, to stop just plowing ahead when everyone's saying "WAIT, there's > serious problems here!". Engagement doesn't work if it's the classic > "suggestions box" positioned directly over a garbage can. I don't think that's true. At least, from my privileged position (where I see much of the "internal" dev chatter from the sidelines) that has never seemed to be the case. > Change for the sake of change can easily be as dangerous. That's true, to a point, but I can say with quite a bit of confidence that nobody at the Foundation ever said "Let's change this" without a solid "This seems to be an improvement because" behind it (or, at the very least "Y is demonstrably broken, we don't know what's the best way to fix it, let's try Z". They may be *wrong*; but every bit of development I've seen is based on a rational desire to improve and from reasonable assumptions about what will be an improvement. And, honestly, it's better to try and possibly fail to fix than it is to avoid trying and definitely stay broken. -- Marc _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
