On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 3:59 PM, Juergen Fenn <schneeschmelze@googlemail.com> wrote:
Thanks for elaborating, Steven, but I think the point is not about
drafting articles in the user namespace _alongside_ the draft
namespace. We would probably decline to introduce a draft namespace in
the first place in dewiki. I hope very much that we won't have another
conflict as we had with the visual editor earlier this year. Wikipedia
is an encyclopedia, not a place for endless experiments. It is not the
WMF to decide on the policy in language versions. This is up to the
community.

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. 

In general, anyone not interested in experimentation has forgotten what Wikipedia is, and where it comes from. The entire Wikipedia project is one of the riskiest and most outlandish experiments with the production of knowledge in the Internet age. People not willing to try new things to make sure Wikipedia evolves along with the rest of the Web should just leave the project now, because you're going to be unhappy as things change. 

We're not testing the draft namespace in the name of experimentation for the sake of experimentation. We're doing to it to help community members, especially new ones, have an easier and more rewarding time expanding the encyclopedia. And we test our changes to software so that we're not making decisions based solely on our personal opinions, but based on real data about what works and what doesn't. 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager