On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Juergen Fenn < schneeschmelze@googlemail.com> wrote:
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.
Let me be clear: I don't mean that I'm not interested in what the community thinks on German Wikipedia. What I am saying is that an old RFC from 2007 is not a reason to dismiss an idea before we've actually explored it.
From the discussion on the Kurier I can see that there are a variety of
opinions about whether it might be useful on German Wikipedia to have drafts. Some think it's an idea with potential, others are skeptical. We'll know more in the months to come.