I disagree Yaroslav, 1- This affects Wikipedia indirectly. When downtime goes up alongside with editing time, we will lose users. New users won't stay, etc. it damages new user retention and therefore, the viability of the project in the long term. 2- Wikipedia is up because of its editors but also because we have a huge infrastructure around it. A simple example: A hypothetical buggy release of mediawiki due to lapses of inexperienced staff (because we lost experienced ones let's say for a similar incident in the future) can lead to a huge security breach and losing a huge amount of trust. This damage can't and won't be fixed. 3- Staff and editors are not totally separated, living in a different world. It's a chain filled by volunteer organizers and volunteer developers. People who are active in chapters, technical projects etc. If staff lose their trust in WMF, all other members of the chain will fall afterwards. A simple example: pywikibot is being maintained entirely by the volunteers but some of them are staff in their volunteer capacity. We lose them, then we lose other maintainers of pywikibot and then eventually bots will fail to run what do you think if we don't have any bots in wikis, especially small wikis? Think of GLAM. Reach out programs, etc.
A note: These are extreme cases. I hope they will never happen.
Best
On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 1:22 AM Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
On 2016-02-18 21:20, Leila Zia wrote:
Hi Dariusz,
I want to share with you the following relatively scattered thoughts and leave it to you to decide how to continue engaging with us. :-) I hope you find them helpful:
- BoT has been too silent, given the state of matters. I'm much more
worried about our volunteers when I say this, than the WMF's staff (which I'm one of).
To be honest, most volunteers do not care. We understand of course that if things would go really wrong, for example, servers stop running, or money runs out and ads are introduced, or English Wikipedia admins continue resigning/being desysopped without proper replacement, so that we have ten active admins, then we are in serious trouble. But as far as things are running quasi-normal, we just continue. I was making 50 to 100 edits per day five years ago, I am making 50 to 100 edits per day now, I will probably still be making 50 to 100 edits per day in five years, unless I die or leave because of a serious demotivation - and this demotivation is unlikely to be related to WMF. I think staff are way more vulnerable to all kinds of events.
- Because of the lack of clear communications by the BoT, I'm uncertain
whether there is an acknowledgement by the BoT about the issues we are facing. What can assure me at the moment is to see a list of items the BoT sees as problematic, and a plan for addressing them, and a schedule for when we should expect seeing them addressed. (Half-jokingly: maybe we need a phabrictor board for the BoT to track specific tasks that can be shared publicly and their prioritization).
This is a cool idea. It is a pity it has zero chances to be realized.
Cheers Yaroslav
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