Dear Steven, I think I understand what you mean, and I am concerned about a
certain conservatism among the editors, too. Some editors complain all the
time anyway. But when 87% reject such a software feature I suppose they
cannot be all wrong (by the way, I am one of this huge majority). There are
two groups among the "rejectors": Those who object a VE in general, and
those who are eager to have one but have experienced major problems using
it (I am one of them).
One of my compatriots has expressed it as I feel it: we often see "beta
phase" software, and sometimes after the beta phase there has never been a
"final version". But those beta versions usually work well. This is
different to the VE version we have experienced.
I do appreciate Erik's explanations from above, see that the Foundation
does notice what happens, and I agree that the existing community should
not have an absolute veto power with regard to the "potential community of
the future". I do have the impression that people were used as guinea pigs
who did not ask for being that. :-)
Kind regards
Ziko
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ziko van Dijk
voorzitter / president Wikimedia Nederland
deputy chair Wikimedia Chapters Association Council
Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
Postbus 167
3500 AD Utrecht
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2013/7/30 Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>
On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 11:13 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
de:wp convinced you. What would it take to
convince you on en:wp? (I'm
asking for a clear objective criterion here. If you can only offer a
subjective one, please explain how de:wp convinced you when en:wp
hasn't.)
[Speaking personally, not for the VE team in any way.]
Why should a consensus of any arbitrary number of power editors be allowed
to define the defaults for all editors, including anonymous and
newly-registered people? Anonymous edits make up about 1/3 of enwiki edits,
IIRC. Every day, 3,000-5,000 new accounts are registered on English
Wikipedia. These people are not even being asked to participate in these
RFCs. Even if they were, they typically don't know how to participate and
find it very intimidating.
This system of gauging the success of VE is heavily biased toward the
concerns of people most likely to dislike change in the software and
frankly, to not really need VE in its current state. That doesn't mean
they're wrong, just that they don't speak for everyone's perspective. The
sad fact is that the people who stand to benefit the most from continued
use and improvements to VE can't participate in an RFC about it, in part
because of wikitext's complexities and annoyances. It is a huge failure of
the consensus process and the Wikimedia movement if we pretend that it's
truly open, fair, and inclusive to make a decision about VE this way.
In WMF design and development, we work our butts off trying to do research,
design, and data analysis that guides us toward building for _all_ the
stakeholders in a feature. We're not perfect at it by a long shot, but I
don't see a good faith effort by English and German Wikipedians running
these RFCs to solicit and consider the opinions of the huge number of
new/anonymous editors. And why should they? That's not their job, they just
want to express their frustration and be listened to.
To answer David's question: I think we need a benchmark for making VE
opt-in again that legitimately represents the needs of _all the people_ who
stand to benefit from continuing the rapid pace of bug fixing and feature
additions. I don't think an on-wiki RFC is it.
Steven
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