Dear Rogol,
On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 7:18 AM, Rogol Domedonfors <domedonfors(a)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