On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 6:05 AM Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt(a)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."