AEvar wrote:
What exactly do you mean by this? How are we not accountable and how
should we, in your opinion, be?
If developers were accountable to the community, then the community would set priorities, schedule, and goals (with due regard to the technical realities), and expect the developers to follow them. There would be some sort of community approval for each functional change. That's not the case at present. I don't really know how actual developer decisionmaking works, although it's clear that the developers respond rapidly to Jimbo's requests (such as the recently added semi-protection feature and the recent proscription on page creation by anons), and it's clear that there's a good deal of internal coordination within the developer community.
Evidence of the lack of community accountability can be seen by such things as the changes in deletion log behavior being somewhat of a surprise to most Wikipedians, and by the fact that relatively important yet minor tweaks such as the repeatedly requested change to the effect of IP blocks on logged-in users have gone unaddressed for over a year.
I realize that the developers spend a great deal of energy on scalability issues on an ongoing basis. I don't intend to be critical of their work. Rather, I am trying to point out the reality of our governance situation. That reality is that any process change that involves a software development component is unrealistic to plan without strong leadership to Jimbo, because the community alone can't compel the software developers to act.
I also think it's worth pointing out that the MediaWiki software project, the WikiMedia project as a whole (of international scope and covering wikibooks, wiktionary, and like projects in addition to the encyclopedias), the en: Wikipedia, and other projects have goals that are sometimes in conflict.