Erik Moeller wrote:
This is why on all major sites, you see a gradual ramp-up of a new feature, and continued improvement once it's widely used. Often there's an opt-in and then an opt-out to ease users into the change. But once a change is launched, it very rarely gets rolled back unless it's just clearly not doing what it's supposed to. Yes, we can all agree that we need to continually raise the bar for how we build software (without getting into analysis paralysis) -- but that doesn't mean that reverting (here or in other cases) once there's an ad hoc vote (or two, or three) is the right thing to do.
No other significantly sized organization follows the development methodology you're proposing WMF should follow. Certainly, WMF is an unusual organization, and we have every desire to take concerns seriously, engage with people, scrutinize data honestly, and work iteratively to make things better for everyone. What we can't and won't accept is the idea that admin-reverts of features are an OK way to try to enforce the outcome of an ad hoc poll or vote.
Is there anything that the German Wikipedia could do to convince you to disable MediaViewer there? Some percentage of active users showing up to say so? Some percentage of users (logged-in or otherwise) disabling the feature? (Presumably we can get stats of some kind.) I'm curious what it would take for you to change course here.
We should note that your behavior on the German Wikipedia has resulted in you being blocked there for a month. I get the sense that many people on the German Wikipedia feel as though there's no way you'll ever be convinced to disable MediaViewer. And from the comments I've been reading, this incident, along with others, has done significant damage to both your reputation and the reputation of the Wikimedia Foundation.
We can - and should, and do - talk to figure things out. We can - and should, and do - work out compromises. (And we did indeed agree to implement a compromise solution for Commons.) But the idea that WMF always must slavishly execute the result of a poll or vote is neither rational nor sustainable, nor has it ever been practice --- much less controversially so in situations where WMF's decisions cannot be overriden by admins employing JavaScript hacks.
You've not established an overriding interest here. If this issue related to online harassment or child protection or biographies of living people or the ability of users to edit or copyright or something else that matters, it might make sense for you to step in.
But we're discussing an entirely supplementary feature. A few wikis (three by my count) have tried MediaViewer and have decided that they'd rather not have it be opt-out on their wiki. Instead they'd prefer that MediaViewer be opt-in for now. These communities have politely requested a configuration change, which should be within the purview of Wikimedia stewards, but MediaWiki doesn't yet have a graphical configuration user interface. Why deny these seemingly reasonable requests?
MZMcBride