Dear Rogol,
On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 7:18 AM, Rogol Domedonfors domedonfors@gmail.com wrote:
1: Surely the audit is of interest to those with whom the Foundation wishes to communicate, which includes the donors, who are paying for it, and the volunteers, whose work is being presented to the world at large in ways that might not always be consistent with their values and practices.
Your mileage may vary, but usually I find that the large majority of donors and volunteers have little interest in reading a document this detailed.
2: If the things that were already going to happen have already happened, then presumably somebody made them happen and those people would find it quick and easy to explain to the community what those things were (I take it from your wording that you are not one of those people). Explaining to the donors what $436K of their money bought would rarely come amiss.
Well, hopefully someone at WMF knows what happened as a result and how things have changed. There is a very brief bit of documentation for 16-17 messaging strategy still marked as a work in progress, so certainly the outcomes could be better documented on Meta.
Whether the staff concerned feel it's a good use of their time to respond in detail on Meta or on this email list, who knows. There is always a judgement call to be made about what it's helpful for staff to spend their time replying to. However, if I was in their position, looking at the nature of comments on Wikipedia Weekly, on Meta and in this thread, I would probably not be leaping to provide a full and thorough response.
2': Andreas made the point that "trying to avoid coverage" about a problem is not necessarily the best strategy. Being open about a problem may be better, and/or more consistent with community values. But that is a discussion for another location. The point of this thread is to encourage participation in that debate.
Yes, indeed, there is a legitimate question about how bullish WMF Comms ought to be about Wikipedia. Generally however I think they get it about right.
3: Quotes are by their nature "selective" since otherwise one would simply repeat the entire document, which is unlikely to be optimal. If you believe those quotes are not representative, have the courage to say so – you have read the whole document, after all.
Simply highlighting the ~1 page of arguably controversial stuff in a 67 page document is also unlikely to be optimal, because it creates a biased and misleading impression of the whole document, and gives the impression (accurately or not) that one's main interest is stirring up controversy.
Regards,
Chris