On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 6:05 AM Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
Dear All,
I thought I would just let it go, but I do not think the discussion currently runs in a good direction.
I do not think it is useful to advocate that Meta is a good discussion platform. It is not. It is dead. At best, there are some announcements posted there, and there is a small group of people who monitor and comment on them. If there is something really outrageous going on, such as the recent rebranding attempt, users can be mobilized from the projects to leave their opinion. This is done by the project users who care, it is done inside the projects or using some extra-Wikimedia means, and it can only happen occasionally. If this does not happen, Meta discussions attract at best a dozen commenters, some of whom are just negative towards everything.
We tried to do something about this for at least 15 years (I myself was around and have been an active Meta user since 2007-2008). Things are not getting better, they are getting worse.
These are great points, thank you Yaroslav. The tone of this discussion is painful to read; angry and argumentative, even rude. But that's likely a function of your last point - things are not getting better, they are getting worse. Yes, Meta is an ugly and dysfunctional place to hold a discussion with many people. That reality leads WMF teams to search for alternatives that work better to achieve specific, discrete goals. That's a reasonable pursuit for Quim, for instance, whose scope is managing the movement strategy process - not shepherding MediaWiki development strategy.
Complaints are better directed at the ED and board - why, after all this time, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on [something] and raising hundreds more, does MediaWiki feel frozen in 2008? Why are discussions so often held on other platforms? If this is a desirable outcome (e.g. a decision has been made that WMF can't replicate the ease of use and modernity of other platforms, which are continually innovating, and we made a decision not to chase Discord and IG and TikTok etc.) then maybe that's ok - if it is articulated somewhere that people can see when they are frustrated with why everything can't take place "on-wiki."