It's time to face reality here: The WMF didn't screw up this RFC, we the English Wikipedia community did.
When we have RFCs that are of interest to a broad portion of the community and will have an impact on the entire community, we do certain things. We advertise it on the watchlist. We arrange for a panel of administrators with experience in assessing consensus to close the discussion - sometimes we line them up before the discussion even happens. We maintain discipline on the RFC page so that there aren't acres of discussion there, and move it to the talk page. We encourage the most fervent supporters and opposers to remain calm and to move on once they've expressed their position. That's what we do when we think something is important - like all the pending changes RFCs and the current conflict of interest discusssions, and the recent discussions about whether certain edit counters should be opt-in or opt-out or automatic.
None of those things happened with this RFC. No watchlist notice. No advance planning for closure. A completely undisciplined RFC. An inexperienced closer who obviously got it wrong, since his initial close didn't match the discussion in the RFC. Instead of people questioning the wrong close, someone writes a script to enact the erroneous close and then encourages an administrator to apply it to the Mediawiki.common.js without explaining exactly what it would do. An administrator who doesn't have the knowledge base to understand the code he was adding adds it - on a page where every other entry for the past several years has been made by experienced and knowledgeable developers. It was entirely correct that his code was reverted - it didn't do what was intended, and it adversely affected every user of English Wikipedia, whether or not they cared about Media Viewer. It was entirely correct that the administrator was warned not to repeat the action - you don't mess around with site-wide impacts - and that he was told the potential consequences if he repeated the action. Warnings are routine and expected if people act outside of our accepted standards or cause harm, whether intended or not. He needed to know that his actions were a big deal with serious consequences.
And now we have the nerve to act as though this is all the WMF's fault. It's not. Every step that led to this breakdown in communication, this disruption in the relationship between the community and the WMF, was taken by members of the English Wikipedia community, with the exception of the reversion of site-breaking code. We did this all by ourselves. I'll even put my hand up and say "geez, maybe I should have pushed harder for a watchlist notice when I saw the RFC" - but the obvious indifference to the issue blinkered me too.
We should be disappointed - but we should be looking at ourselves and fixing the problems we're responsible for. The WMF isn't perfect, and it's made some incredibly bone-headed decisions in the past. It's also made some really good decisions, and none of them were entirely perfect right out of the box and needed tweaking. Instead of rejecting those decisions outright because they failed to be perfect, we all worked together - WMF, developers, and community members from all sorts of projects - to get them right. We need to go back to that perspective. Everyone does. Not just the WMF - our community does too.
Risker/Anne
On 14 July 2014 01:40, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gryllida,
As I said on the Arbcom case page, RfCs result in changes to Wikipedia on a regular basis despite having a small numbers of participants in each RfC, and current English Wikipedia policy does not require a minimum number of participants beyond what is necessary to establish consensus. Furthermore, any assertion that the MV RfC was invalid because of its advertising or because it had too few participants would open up countless RfCs to being challenged for the same reason. I believe that the form of the MediaViewer RfC and participation in it were sufficient to establish a legitimate consensus.
I am still thinking through the effects that this situation has on the WMF-community relationship. I'm pretty discouraged, and I know others are too.
Pine
On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Gryllida gryllida@fastmail.fm wrote:
Pine and all,
Please read here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Media_Viewer/June_2014_RfC#Prop...
Gryllida.
On Thu, 10 Jul 2014, at 15:03, Pine W wrote:
This discussion has closed on English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Media_Viewer/June_2014_RfC
Will WMF deactivate MediaViewer on English Wikipedia per community consensus?
Also, as WMF probably knows, Commons is currently having a similar discussion:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/Media_Viewer...
Thanks,
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