Hi Jane,
I think Andres is completely right of this description, that the whole exercise was designed by functionaries for functionaries, and nobody ever thought that volunteers working on the projects could be involved.
It is indeed right that many of those do not care about the strategy discussions and just edit in their projects (though even say a Wikipedia editor from time to time confronts the situation that Commons and Wikidata exist but do not necessarily have the same policies as their project). But many do care. In the 2010 strategy discussions, we had the volunteer editors providing the input, and this is why this was a success. Apparently, this time there were a large number of applications from the volunteer editors who are not functionaries.
Now, you can say that functionaries and staffers are sometimes editors as well. Indeed, some of them are and are well respected in the communities (Maggie Dennis is a great example). Some edited the projects before but since then have gone inactive and have no idea what is going on in the communities. Some are openly fighting with the communities and have no or very little respect there. Some never edited. Well, you can of course make a selection and hope that these selected people understand everything about the variety of our projects. May be. Or may be not. We had in the past very bad decisions which WMF, with varying degree of success, tried to impose on the projects. I often had an impression that people making these decisions had no understanding of what is actually going on the projects, and do not even know whom to ask.
Now the whole process only convinces me that this would repeat more and more often. Especially since in the first round much of the project feedback was ignored.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 9:28 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm. Yes and no. Yes the May 2017 conference suffered from some interesting selection bias, but no the people there were not all brainwashed into forgetting their "wildness". We are all still wild wild Wikipedians at heart, speaking for the 2006 cohort in its entirety. I really doubt whether the WMF is trying to shove us all in a direction of their choosing. I think that we are in fact split down the middle into parties that believe "some languages are better than others" and "let's save all existing languages on the planet, including all of their fonts ever used on- and offline". Then there is a huge discrepancy in workflow for these people and the folks who work in just one language and never think of language as a movement topic at all. Among this monolingual crowd (many of whom do not subscribe to any mailing list or other communication outlets) are the overlapping groups between the "field workers" and the "library workers". The field workers tend to operate more by a "drive-by" methodology, and the "library workers" tend to operate more by a "step-by-step" methodology. I respectfully submit that we have all dabbled in all of these worlds and therefore we all have enough common sense to shout "Whoa!" if something really really wrong gets proposed. But in the past I have felt quite strongly that something was really really wrong, but it turned out it was just a factor of me being unaware of workflow difficulties experienced by others. So e.g. personally I was against the idea of "protected pages" but have come around to seeing they are useful - even on Wikidata.
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 10:12 PM, Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:
As I see it the strategy process is run for the functionaries in the movement and by them. People with focus on contributing to the projects
are
not involved, when volunteers is mentioned it is mostly people running worskhops for beginners etc, a kind of semi functionaries, not the hard core contributes.
This could be a good thing and foster a new set of moment leaders, fully in agreement with goals and strategy. It could also be seen as a
weakness,
as we do not recognize the more "wild" (but creative)y culture in our communities and only have the "nice" and obedient culture being accepted.
Facts
The vision was really created in Wikiconf 2017 by functionaries
The way forward was defined by Wikiconf 2017 by functionaries
The set up of work groups was from the beginning set up to include
(only)
functionaries (time requirement, and first it was also talked of
candidates
should be endorsed by local chapters). And the actual selection was not done transparent as is the culture of the communities but by "boss" selection (I only feel the movement is starting to resemble a big
company,
not the vibrant communities)
Anders
Den 2018-07-24 kl. 21:29, skrev Yaroslav Blanter:
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 9:16 PM, David Cuenca Tudela <dacuetu@gmail.com
wrote:
I do not know what really happened but if I listen to what has been said here and earlier on similar occasions, my conclusion is that for the Strategy Team we - volunteers who are working on the projects but are
not
associated with the chapters, do not show up at Wikimania, do not attend real-life tutorials organized by WMF - just do not exist.
If this is the case, this is a serious gap to be bridged. So far I have net see even an acknowledgement of its existence.
Cheers Yaroslav _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik i/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik i/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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