A note from a dev. If you rant about their evil enough, you can successfully get them to say "fine, you do it" and leave. Then you can feel a real sense of achievement at your good work for Wikipedia.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com Date: 11 Jan 2008 17:51 Subject: [Foundation-l] tech team - content community bottleneck To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Hi!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the developer who made the switch is not an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. Take it to wikitech- l or wikien-l, please.
Well, there is quite a bit of foundation issue here, and I'd like to explaim some general projects bits (that are neither technology, nor single-project related):
See, Jens is not employee, though has been the developer with most community-facing attitude. He has been implementing, at his own will, most of community requests. He is a volunteer, and has been dedicated to our ideals more and longer than most of us. When members of communities decide to attack with "This developer has exhibited extremely poor judgment and a gross disregard for the WIkipedia community" and nobody takes that back or apologizes, it is no fun to continue doing all these small things.
Foundation doesn't really facilitate this process at the moment - it is all left to individual care - both filtering, evaluating if change X would successfully follow all few hundreds policy pages, and implementation, what often requires extensive code review and familiarity of our operating environment. Do note, that community representatives come not only with these changes - various 'oh noes, remove this from site' requests are quite common, and every of them are questionable.
If people will be going to raise such huge flames and attack implementors for actually doing the job, we will really ask foundation to facilitate not only all the evaluation of every request that comes in from communities, but to provide with implementor resources too.
We have far more fun things (our jobs, lives, even wikipedia technology development) to do than go into endless debates with people who favor endless debates, sorry.
-- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]
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David Gerard wrote:
A note from a dev. If you rant about their evil enough, you can successfully get them to say "fine, you do it" and leave. Then you can feel a real sense of achievement at your good work for Wikipedia.
- d.
No-one is calling the dev "evil" - there work is very much appreciated. All that is being said, is that a little more care is needed when making a call on consensus in an obviously contentious area in our community. One decision here, made no doubt in good faith, by a good guy, has resulted in a disproportionate amount of drama - and the nature of these decisions is that they are effectively (although not theoretically) irrevocable.
All that was needed was a quick e-mail to an arb, or other established community member who didn't have a huge axe to grind, and I'm sure he'd have been told:
"hm, we've been debating this without resolution for years, so a six-day poll at Christmas is not really indicative of anything much - wait a bit"
Anyway, it is a done deal now. I guess all we are looking for is some assurance that next time there will be a little more checking.
And I /would/ suggest this is a role that arbs could take on (who else?), NOT as policy makers or adjudicates after the fact, but as people trusted by the community for sane unbiased judgment - who tend to know what's going on - who can give a developer a sanity check as regards where the consensus on en.wp lies.
Doc
On 12/01/2008, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
And I /would/ suggest this is a role that arbs could take on (who else?), NOT as policy makers or adjudicates after the fact, but as people trusted by the community for sane unbiased judgment - who tend to know what's going on - who can give a developer a sanity check as regards where the consensus on en.wp lies.
Oh yeah, that might be workable.
It's important that the arbcom is for resolving interpersonal disputes - it's NOT the government of en:wp,even though people keep trying to thrust this role upon them (and they have the good sense to avoid it).
To the extent they take on functions as a voice of en:wp (checkuser, oversight, emergency deadminning, etc) it's because there's no-one else who can reasonably do the job and they get volunteered for the particular role.
In terms of requests like this ("please switch on this function for en:wp"), they would be the right ones. But requiring all such changes to go through them is fraught with instruction creep and bureaucracy.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
In terms of requests like this ("please switch on this function for en:wp"), they would be the right ones. But requiring all such changes to go through them is fraught with instruction creep and bureaucracy.
- d.
Same principle as with anything else in wikimedia, if the change is non-controversial, or easily revertible then, by all means, Be Bold. We don't waste needless words or have needless processes. Nor do we spend too much time placating very small minorities who will resist everything and anything for ever.
If, however, there's evidence of contention (like 130 oppose votes), sane people with strong doubts, and the change is practically hard to revert, then go very very slowly and carefully, discussing all the way and sanity checking. Because speed, or wrong decisions, will simply result in bad feeling, disruption, and time wasted in disputes after-the-fact. QED
Doc
doc wrote:
If, however, there's evidence of contention (like 130 oppose votes), sane people with strong doubts, and the change is practically hard to revert, then go very very slowly and carefully, discussing all the way and sanity checking. Because speed, or wrong decisions, will simply result in bad feeling, disruption, and time wasted in disputes after-the-fact. QED
This should apply retroactively too. If this feature had been implemented after an ambiguous poll, exactly as it had been, but then after this kerfuffle had arisen in response it had been promptly disabled again pending review I suspect there would have been far less acrimony. The problem IMO is not so much the seemingly arbitrary dev action as it is the seemingly _irreversible_ arbitrary dev action. I have no problem giving devs wide latitude in what they can do as long as I can be reasonably confident that when something screwy happens my "woah, waitaminute!" reaction will actually have some impact.
On Sat, 12 Jan 2008, doc wrote:
All that is being said, is that a little more care is needed when making a call on consensus in an obviously contentious area in our community.
Why would anyone do this?
No, seriously. If you make a de-facto irreversible decision without real consensus, you succeed. Your decision is in place. You do get some drama, but since the decision can't be reversed, you don't need to listen to it.
If you try for consensus first, you might succeed or you might not.
There's no downside whatsoever to not getting consensus, and there's a downside *to* getting consensus (a chance of failure).
Why would anyone bother getting consensus under these circumstances?
(And yes, the same goes for spoiler warnings and episodes.)
If a dev screws up, are we supposed to ignore the fact and risk a similar screwup in the future?
On 12/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
A note from a dev. If you rant about their evil enough, you can successfully get them to say "fine, you do it" and leave. Then you can feel a real sense of achievement at your good work for Wikipedia.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com Date: 11 Jan 2008 17:51 Subject: [Foundation-l] tech team - content community bottleneck To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Hi!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the developer who made the switch is not an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. Take it to wikitech- l or wikien-l, please.
Well, there is quite a bit of foundation issue here, and I'd like to explaim some general projects bits (that are neither technology, nor single-project related):
See, Jens is not employee, though has been the developer with most community-facing attitude. He has been implementing, at his own will, most of community requests. He is a volunteer, and has been dedicated to our ideals more and longer than most of us. When members of communities decide to attack with "This developer has exhibited extremely poor judgment and a gross disregard for the WIkipedia community" and nobody takes that back or apologizes, it is no fun to continue doing all these small things.
Foundation doesn't really facilitate this process at the moment - it is all left to individual care - both filtering, evaluating if change X would successfully follow all few hundreds policy pages, and implementation, what often requires extensive code review and familiarity of our operating environment. Do note, that community representatives come not only with these changes - various 'oh noes, remove this from site' requests are quite common, and every of them are questionable.
If people will be going to raise such huge flames and attack implementors for actually doing the job, we will really ask foundation to facilitate not only all the evaluation of every request that comes in from communities, but to provide with implementor resources too.
We have far more fun things (our jobs, lives, even wikipedia technology development) to do than go into endless debates with people who favor endless debates, sorry.
-- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]
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On 12/01/2008, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
If a dev screws up, are we supposed to ignore the fact and risk a similar screwup in the future?
That's a remarkably general statement in response to a particular case. Are you asserting the dev here screwed up?
- d.
On 12/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/01/2008, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
If a dev screws up, are we supposed to ignore the fact and risk a similar screwup in the future?
That's a remarkably general statement in response to a particular case. Are you asserting the dev here screwed up?
Yes. He acted based on a simple majority where consensus was required but absent.
James Farrar wrote:
On 12/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/01/2008, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
If a dev screws up, are we supposed to ignore the fact and risk a similar screwup in the future?
That's a remarkably general statement in response to a particular case. Are you asserting the dev here screwed up?
Yes. He acted based on a simple majority where consensus was required but absent.
And when it turned out that his action was widely considered improper (or at least controversial), he didn't revert it.
Devs are wonderful and fine people for the work they contribute, but they shouldn't get to set policy by fiat simply because of their ability to do so.