On 12.08.2014 21:41, Magnus Manske wrote:
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net wrote:
This is serious. WMF really needs to appreciate the expertise of the author community and accept their experience a important and valid. If authors tell the WMF and particularly the devs, that a particular function is necessary, then the devs really, really need to think.
I do agree with this. Visual Editor (which works much better these days) and MediaViewer are not aimed at the experienced editor. They aim to make the reader more comfortable, and try to ease the first steps into editing. Winning new editors has been deemed a priority, somewhat at the expense of WMF-made support for the power user. This is a judgement call the Foundation has to make.
I do not undersign that dichotomy between readers and authors. And I certainly do not accept any claim, that the MWF know all about what readers need to become authors, while the authors are ignorant about that. The results of the millions of dollars, the WMF put into their understanding of readers interest are less than sterling in this regard.
A formal RfD must not be taken lightly, overruling it by creating a whole new user class, and crippling the elected admins is inpermissible. WMF has broken trust again and this time in a unprecedented way.
As Erik pointed out, WMF had made it quite clear that they reserve the right to overrule the community in that specific matter, before the Meinungsbild was done. WMF then acted as announced, and refused to be "hacked" out of their own servers. An unfortunate escalation on both sides, but since they never promised to accept the Meinungsbild (quite the opposite!), it was not a breach of trust.
Frankly: I don't care the least, what Eric says. Of course the Meinungsbild (RfD) at deWP was a vote of noconfidence after the previous events at enWP. But the reaction by WMF was unprecedented and it was a mistake. A serious one. It damaged the relation between the Community and the WMF, it killed Jan's job and it made Rachel's job very difficult if not untenable. To describe Eric's action I am tempted to use a metaphor that includes black uniforms and heavy boots. But that would not be appropriately written by a German to a German.
Until this event, I thought the dev process to be broken, not just the communication around devs. But now I believe the conflict runs deeper.
It points out an issue we (community and WMF) should discuss, in a more general sense. What should the decision process be for technical changes? When does the Foundation get precendence, and when should the community have the last word? What weight should small-scale "votes" of editors have? Should random polls be done, and included in such votes? Etc.
The MediaViewer "affair" itself gets blown out of proportion IMO.
I agree that this is not just about the MediaViewer but about a general pattern of behavior perceived by the community. The WMF's decision making regarding software and skin development is broken. Its targets are flawed, it is not properly communicated with the community, the actual development processes result in incredibly crappy software that gets rolled out non the less in pre-alpha states.
Do I have to list all the broken projects? Liquid feedback, article feedback tool, image filter, visual editor, flow, the new "thumb" layout.
How do you explain that to donors by the way?
All of them show that the devs and the management level do not understand the features of the existing solutions, particularly the well established tools and sometimes work arounds, authors created over the years to deal with the very basic MediaWiki. But understanding the actual use of MediaWiki is paramount to improving it.
Ciao Henning