2013/12/21 Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
I fully agree that the Foundation staff have pretty
much no business setting
individual project policy. But this isn't policy, it's software. It's the
WMF's responsibility to develop and maintain the software that makes it
possible for the community to do its work. Decision-making about technical
changes is a partnership between many parties -- editors/admins of local
projects, Foundation staff, and volunteer technical developers of MediaWiki.
I beg your pardon, Steven, but this is really missing the point. The
WMF obviously plans to introduce technical features without even
asking the community beforehand. But these new features will change
the way we work in Wikipedia fundamentally. It is a matter of policy
where we draft new articles.
We have just experienced the massive and embarrassing failure of the
visual editor in both the German and the English Wikipedia. What we
need least would be another confrontation between the Foundation and
the community.
I am not quite sure whether you have been told about this, but German
regulars are more and more annoyed by the impression that the WMF does
not respect their idea of how the project should be run. They are
feeling all the more frustrated to hear that the WMF plans to
introduce any technical feature by force we do not want to have in
here.
To cut a long matter short: If we have any namespace or not is up to
the community, not the WMF. We will have to hold an RfC beforehand.
Regards,
Jürgen.