2013/12/21 Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org:
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.