On Sun, 25 Aug 2019 at 00:22, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)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