On Sun, 25 Aug 2019 at 00:22, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
When the FRAMBAN occurred, nearly 10% of the English Wikipedia functionaries resigned. Many have returned, but that's only because WMF backed off. We lost many of our best to that, and if WMF hadn't swiftly backed down, they would have stayed gone. And some still have stayed gone regardless. We won't recover from the damage they inflicted.
There's a different interpretation to those events:
nearly 10% of the English Wikipedia functionaries resigned
Maybe I missed somebody, but the only functionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Functionaries, who resigned was BU Rob13, others were admins and bureaucrats, not functionaries. It's worth noting, that Rob did not resign because of the WMF's office action, but the opposite: the community's response to it. The 22 admins who resigned was ca. 5.4% of the reasonably active admins ("411 [admins] with 24 [actions] or more in the year").
Many have returned
Read: Some of those resignations were for the effect. In a superficial check I only found a few, who have actually returned.
WMF backed off
Did it? Fram is still banned, temporary office actions policy consultation is in preparation. I would agree that the WMF is more open to conversation now, which is good.
We lost many of our best to that
That can't be claimed objectively. There was an attempt to measure the activity of the resigned admins: a statistics about number of admin actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_to_the_Wikimedia_Foundation%27s_ban_of_Fram/Archive_11#Active_admins_and_contributions_from_resigned_admins. It's subjective, how many actions in a year should count as being active. "As a more reasonable bar, there are 411 [admins] with 24 [actions] or more in the year". 22/411 = 5.4% of the "active" admins resigned, those who "were responsible for 19423 admin actions or 2.4% of the total". Based on this dataset, the resigned 5.4% of admins made 2.4% of the admin actions in one year. Less than half of the average. This is not representative of the "quality" of an admin, but shows that their resignation was not a major disruption, contrary to how it is dramatized.
I can't see how any lesson can be learned from that except for "Never do
something like that again".
"Do better than that" would be the solution oriented lesson to be learned. By better I mean to do a cooperative process. I wonder if that "community", whose opinion you represent, have learned from these recommendations, that there are long-running issues to be solved. It's not only the Foundations' lacking cooperation with the communities, that's under scrutiny here, but also the communities' failure to resolve fundamental issues. There would be no need for intervention, if the communities were able to do this on their own.
What WMF should've learned from that is to never pull any hamfisted interference with a local community again.
Starting these conversations was a major step forward from the "hamfisted interference" of the framban. Can the community show good faith in response, and cooperatively participate? Many of us did.
Aron