When I joined Wikipedia more than 2 years ago, I remember much unhappiness due to lack of information of some parts of the project. For those who may not have this memory (omg, I feel old in saying this), lack of information lead to a fork. Though a fork is certainly very unlikely these days, I believe the growing feeling that fair process is not respected, is bad for general spirit.

I remember that situation improved a lot, partly because mailing lists were reorganised, partly because meta became multilingual, and mostly partly because people made an effort to 1) give information and 2) give it at the right place 3) discuss things before deciding it (or at least gave people the opportunity to discuss it)

Sorry to say that, but I think we are on the bad slope again. And I think we should seriously think about it.

Typical signs which I believe show information flow is broken again ? -> I hear people complain on irc -> We start mail crossing again in an attempt to restructure mailing flow -> Things are learned again, not by regular channel, but by personal information network.

Couple of points

* I think that software improvement should follow needs, not the reverse. It may be either because there is open and pressing request from users, or because there was a suggestion and a developer had a great idea. But it is curious that soft improvements are made without users knowing (ie, without the improvement been mentionned elsewhere than on wikitech). Could soft improvement be mentionned on wikipedia-l then ?

* When a soft improvement is done to fit legal requirements, please, could it be discussed on foundation-l to check if that complies with the legal requirements ?

* When a hardware update is being done, please, could it be announced on wikitech, or on meta, so that when users wonder what is going on, there is something else to answer than "no idea"

* When a change is made in the purpose of donations, could it be mentionned on foundation-l (rather than only on en:) so that all projects could change the initial purposes given by Jimbo ?

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