On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas@googlemail.com
wrote:
- WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the respective project communities.
Uh oh - criticism time...
WikiLove was developed supposedly to address one of the major problems of English Wikipedia (a problem which also affects other Wiki's to a larger or lesser extent). It is an example of a solution being developed by those without a full understanding of the problem (which is no criticism of the devs involved; there is no reason they should understand the issues in depth).
Wikilove was produced by Ryan Kaldari, and active Wikimedian and participant on this list as well as a staffer, pretty much on his own time (from what I understood as he explained it to me). I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm off point, there. I don't think he was out of touch with the issues in depth...
It was ten deployed with minimal discussion, once again demonstrating the lack of links between the developers and the community (because just about anyone could have pointed out it would have been controversial).
It was deployed with minimal discussion, but I still wouldn't assign the blame to devs not understanding the community. You're making some pretty big assumptions.