On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 7:39 PM, Tim Landscheidt tim@tim-landscheidt.de wrote:
Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
[…]
On a separate note to those of you who contribute to technical spaces and are not happy about how some aspects have gone:
Matthew and a few other people have been trying /really hard/ to make Wikimedia's technical spaces better. You know that embarking on such a
path
is very difficult: it requires spending many many hours of your time
(read
life) on it, elaborating, deliberating, documenting, discussing things
with
people from different paths of life, etc. They have been doing it for months now. It's my understanding that they are doing this not to
exercise
power over others but to make our technical spaces better, to make them more enjoyable to contribute in.
For all of us who contribute in technical spaces, we should remember: We may not agree with every step they take, but we all owe it to them to
help
them on this path. What they are doing is a good thing and that's
something
that sometimes gets lost in these lengthy conversations.
This is a circular and illogical argument. Just because someone has good intentions or invested time and effort does not mean that the path they chose is the right one to take. And if someone is steering towards a cliff, encouraging peo- ple to keep pushing the cart to honour the navigator's dedi- cation is self-destructive.
I agree with everything you say above, and I'd like to clarify something in response to your first sentence, as reading that and re-reading the latter part of my initial post, I realize I may have signaled something that I didn't mean to:
I didn't mean to say that since people have spent a lot of time on task X, we need to help them finish it. I meant to say the following:
* I wanted to ask everyone involved in these discussions to have more empathy towards one another. Things sometimes don't go well when we start sending back-and-forth emails on this list, and on this thread specifically, we've already started some loaded statements. My request was to please remember that there is a human on the other side reading your message, most likely operating based on good faith: this person is, hopefully, making decisions based on logic, but he/she does have emotions, let's keep that in mind.
Leila
Tim
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe