In order to anticipate and meet the needs of readers, you have to have a theory of what those needs are, and what will meet them. The RfC process is one way of getting toward such a theory, and the kind of work done by the WMF's Multimedia Team over the last year or so is another.
The pros and cons of RFC-based consensus have been pretty well covered by others in this thread, and I won't go through them all again -- but I do want to strongly endorse the point Todd Allen made, that many regular volunteers DO care about the experience of readers, and many of us DO have important insights into how readers, new contributors, etc. experience the site, and what would work for them.
The Multimedia Team's approach, on the other hand, seems at this point to be all "con," no "pro." Many people in the discussions on ENWP, Commons, and MediaWiki have elaborated on the many problems in the methodology. English Wikipedian Nyttend's comment, while phrased a bit more harshly than I would choose, summarizes the points fairly well:
"Here at Wikipedia, we have a term for [aspects of the Multimedia Team's gathering of statistics]: votestacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votestacking, which is a form of inappropriate canvassing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CANVASS. Discussions affected by canvassing are not considered to result in consensus, and those engaged in votestacking are shown the door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLOCK: we do not accept their ideas." -Nyttend https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Media_Viewer/June_2014_...
So -- if we are to eschew the RfC process, what better process is available? How are we going to develop a clear shared understanding of the needs of readers, and the best methods to meet those needs?
-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]
On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
Keep in mind also that power users like you have access to power tools: preferences, user scripts, gadgets, and API client applications exist EXACTLY so that you guys can completely customize the entire user experience for your specialized workflows.
-- brion
On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 9:52 AM, Pierre-Selim pierre-selim@huard.info wrote:
Well thank you Brion, at least that may explains why things are imposed
to
the editors community and that also explains the high rejection rate from the editors community of the new big features such as VE. For once take time, think about editors workflow.
For exemple on french wikipedia we used to have a direct link to
Wikimedia
Commons (we technically removed the description page proxy), now we have totally lost this feature. So yes you may think it's not important, but
as
an administrator on Wikimedia Commons it screws my workflow when I see an obvious copyvio on the French Wikipedia.
So yes you make software for your users, but I think you're
underestimating
part of your users that you should not.
2014-07-10 18:36 GMT+02:00 Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com:
On 10/07/14 15:53, Brion Vibber wrote:
Perhaps it's time to stop calling self-selected surveys of a tiny
subset
of our user base "community consensus".
The vast majority of our user base never logs in, never edits, and
never
even hears about these RfC pages. Those are the people we're making an encyclopedia for.
-- brion
And those who do log in, edit, and comment on RfCs generally do so with the understanding, on some level, that everything they do, that the
entire
encyclopedia, is for the readers, because without an audience there
would
be nothing. They know their audience, they interact directly with this audience on the talkpages and in email, and indeed they often use the
site
exactly as this audience would, simply taking things a step further to
edit
as well.
So when they speak for the users who never log in, never edit, and
never
comment, do not discount them. No more than you discount yourself when
you
try to speak for the users who never log in, never edit, and never
comment.
-I
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