I'd agree with Risker more or less wholeheartedly - communication is a
multilateral thing not a unilateral thing, and I think we dropped the
ball on handling this discussion properly.
This certainly isn't new - holding a large-scale community discussion
is *hard* and both the community and WMF tend to have problems
instigating and managing it - but this could have been a lot better.
I've been mostly offwiki for the past few weeks (and had my attention
sapped by a different RFC), but I'll also put my hand up and say I
should have done something - I normally try and make sure discussions
like this get advertised at a suitable level and I was vaguely aware
this one was going on. Mea culpa.
I've been doing some thinking about this over the past year or so,
bubbling away in the back of my mind, after a talk at last Wikimania -
would there be any interest/usefulness if I sat down and tried to dump
it into a "how to run a large project RFC, and what doesn't work" page
somewhere?
Andrew.
On 14 July 2014 09:04, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It's time to face reality here: The WMF
didn't screw up this RFC, we the
English Wikipedia community did.
When we have RFCs that are of interest to a broad portion of the community
and will have an impact on the entire community, we do certain things. We
advertise it on the watchlist. We arrange for a panel of administrators
with experience in assessing consensus to close the discussion - sometimes
we line them up before the discussion even happens. We maintain discipline
on the RFC page so that there aren't acres of discussion there, and move it
to the talk page. We encourage the most fervent supporters and opposers to
remain calm and to move on once they've expressed their position. That's
what we do when we think something is important - like all the pending
changes RFCs and the current conflict of interest discusssions, and the
recent discussions about whether certain edit counters should be opt-in or
opt-out or automatic.
None of those things happened with this RFC. No watchlist notice. No
advance planning for closure. A completely undisciplined RFC. An
inexperienced closer who obviously got it wrong, since his initial close
didn't match the discussion in the RFC. Instead of people questioning the
wrong close, someone writes a script to enact the erroneous close and then
encourages an administrator to apply it to the Mediawiki.common.js without
explaining exactly what it would do. An administrator who doesn't have the
knowledge base to understand the code he was adding adds it - on a page
where every other entry for the past several years has been made by
experienced and knowledgeable developers. It was entirely correct that his
code was reverted - it didn't do what was intended, and it adversely
affected every user of English Wikipedia, whether or not they cared about
Media Viewer. It was entirely correct that the administrator was warned
not to repeat the action - you don't mess around with site-wide impacts -
and that he was told the potential consequences if he repeated the action.
Warnings are routine and expected if people act outside of our accepted
standards or cause harm, whether intended or not. He needed to know that
his actions were a big deal with serious consequences.
And now we have the nerve to act as though this is all the WMF's fault.
It's not. Every step that led to this breakdown in communication, this
disruption in the relationship between the community and the WMF, was
taken by members of the English Wikipedia community, with the exception of
the reversion of site-breaking code. We did this all by ourselves. I'll
even put my hand up and say "geez, maybe I should have pushed harder for a
watchlist notice when I saw the RFC" - but the obvious indifference to the
issue blinkered me too.
We should be disappointed - but we should be looking at ourselves and
fixing the problems we're responsible for. The WMF isn't perfect, and it's
made some incredibly bone-headed decisions in the past. It's also made
some really good decisions, and none of them were entirely perfect right
out of the box and needed tweaking. Instead of rejecting those decisions
outright because they failed to be perfect, we all worked together - WMF,
developers, and community members from all sorts of projects - to get them
right. We need to go back to that perspective. Everyone does. Not just
the WMF - our community does too.
Risker/Anne
On 14 July 2014 01:40, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Gryllida,
As I said on the Arbcom case page, RfCs result in changes to Wikipedia on a
regular basis despite having a small numbers of participants in each RfC,
and current English Wikipedia policy does not require a minimum number of
participants beyond what is necessary to establish consensus. Furthermore,
any assertion that the MV RfC was invalid because of its advertising or
because it had too few participants would open up countless RfCs to being
challenged for the same reason. I believe that the form of the MediaViewer
RfC and participation in it were sufficient to establish a legitimate
consensus.
I am still thinking through the effects that this situation has on the
WMF-community relationship. I'm pretty discouraged, and I know others are
too.
Pine
On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Gryllida <gryllida(a)fastmail.fm> wrote:
Pine and all,
Please read here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Media_Viewer/June_2014_RfC#Pro…
Gryllida.
On Thu, 10 Jul 2014, at 15:03, Pine W wrote:
This discussion has closed on English Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Media_Viewer/June_2014_RfC
Will WMF deactivate MediaViewer on English Wikipedia per community
consensus?
Also, as WMF probably knows, Commons is currently having a similar
discussion:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/Media_Viewe…
Thanks,
Pine
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