Re: [Wikimedia Education] [Wikimedia-l] Engineering Community

First, thanks to John Vandenberg for considering co-mentoring the accuracy review project for the Indonesian Wikipedia. I think he would be an excellent co-mentor. But ideally I also hope to also obtain at least one co-mentor from WMF engineering, design, or education divisions, and a co-mentor from the WEF too, please: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review#Mentors_needed_.28at_least_t… Oliver Keyes wrote: Co-mentoring the accuracy review project is literally nothing but communication. Community members ask for the Foundation's help all the time. And even if the mentors end up helping with some of the code, Rachel asked about interacting with the community, not just communicating with it. And it should not be "my thing" -- it is supposed to improve wikipedias and similar references in all languages, by addressing their primary existential crisis: more out of date content than volunteer editors are willing or able to maintain. It's lucky that we may be able do that with the side effect of creating the largest automatic computer-aided instruction system ever, by several orders of magnitude. But that's more than just I can possibly do just in my spare time. It will have to be a community effort. The Foundation can't directly sponsor content improvements, but creating a system to support the community's efforts in that regard is fine. Assuming everyone approves after testing, either Foundation could, if they wanted to, cause it to be used in many ways which would not risk the WMF's safe harbor provisions. That would be more difficult for the community. Furthermore, there was no way 2.5 years ago, when I was asking that the Foundation pay market rate for technical staff to compete in retaining and attracting the best and brightest, that I would have known this would become a GSoC proposal under a new co-mentor requirement today. So the insinuation that there is some kind of a preconceived attempt at quid-pro-quo is absurd. There are some very serious downsides to repeatedly being the only one opposed to groupthink, and I have no regrets about bringing up the fact that I've repeatedly had to deal with that kind of impediment to progress without even a single word of thanks. I'm not asking for a medal, just common courtesy. And maybe people who find themselves in situations where they might be involved with groupthink mistakes should be a little less harsh against those who are trying to fight such mistakes. Our contemporary top-heavy economic predicament is the result of too much groupthink leveraged by the sociopathic few, resulting in the vast majority of consumers having lost ground during the current economic expansion (e.g., as shown in http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/upshot/the-benefits-of-economic-expansion… -- especially its graphs.) If there is a better example of unsustainability, I would like to see it. Yes, I stick my neck out to fight for people who are getting the short end of the stick, and causing their own organizations, whether they be foundations or nations, to be less effective because of it, and I'm proud I am one of the very few who do. On Saturday, 14 February 2015, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote: