I understand that the community conversation is planned to be conducted for around the next 6 weeks, it’s the discussion of the summary of that, which is planned for one week. Alice.

Just to emphasize my point: I have searched, and was still unable to find any serious consideration or response for some of the feedback that was provided all the way back in August. In the next iteration, these examples seem to have been ignored. It may well be that this is a particularly sad example and that in other cases this was done much better, or that I happen to be looking at this one WG that didn't engage/respond/consider . However, this strengthens my feeling that it would be nice to have open and clear expectations to the community what will be done with their feedback. changes should be expected based on feedback (that would be the same as my very limited experience last August), but that someone will only summarize opposition in some report to the board. Is that a correct reading? This strongly informs the strategy for community members to follow: try to engage in an argument/conversation, or in activist petitions, if they would have concerns with some recommendation. Lodewijk On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 11:42 AM effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Nicole and Kaarel, Thank you for sharing your comments. A few points: * I realize that a lot of time and money has been spent in the strategy process to this point. I hope that there will be consensus on at least some of the recommendations. * Hopefully the discussions in the next few weeks will be informative. Even if some recommendations are not adopted, that is *not* necessarily a failure, and I hope that the strategy organizers and volunteers will not be discouraged if only a minority of recommendations are adopted. Recommendations which are not adopted may become fruitful seeds for future conversations. * At this stage in the strategy process, changes are not prescribed <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prescribe>. The community and WMF are free to adopt or decline them without lengthy discussions and speculation about what impacts recommendations would have if adopted. Volunteers are not obligated to spend their time engaging with this process, or to their time justifying their decisions to the organizers of the strategy process. However, there is likely to be discussion about the strategy recommendations, and hopefully those discussions will provide a sense of areas where there may be grounds for a formal consensus later this year. * I believe that the formal process for adopting strategy recommendations by the community could take one or both of these forms. (My impression, which may be incorrect, is that you intend for this adoption process to take place after the "community conversations" in the next few months.) 1. A global request for comment on Meta, with each recommendation set for an individual !vote so that individual recommendations may be accepted or not. 2. Local requests for comment, according to what participants on each wiki decide. This may be practical for some recommendations more than others. I hope that these comments are helpful. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

That's...really not how this works. We don't say "It's hard to gain consensus, so screw it, we're going ahead anyway." If you can't gain consensus for what you're doing, then you should stop doing it. Yes, consensus for major changes is hard. That doesn't mean it is not required or should be ignored. Todd On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 5:48 PM Leila Zia &lt;lzia(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

The following views are mine. I'm not affiliated with either the Foundation or those speaking in the name of the communities. This is a volunteer's opinion. On Tue, 21 Jan 2020 at 04:24, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: To measure the needs of the movement, the organizers of the consultation have to take into consideration all the editors - present and future -, the affiliates, and even the readers. Thousands of regulars, hundreds of thousands of casuals, not counting the millions of readers, who contribute with their donations. The participation of this many people in the consultations would not be feasible. The most that can be expected is a few hundred editors, who voice their opinions, mostly representing the English Wikipedia and Commons. I believe this is what Leila meant. Any of the consensus models can only reflect a local consensus <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus#Levels_of_consensus> at best. Deciding the movement's future based upon this comparatively small selection of contributors would result in a one-sided outcome. The needs of the movement, however, can be measured globally by systematic research and this is what the Foundation has been doing in recent years and now serves as the basis for the recommendations. My personal experience and impressions confirm many of these findings: The movement needs to move forward, to keep up with the times. The start of a new decade is the best time to take that big step. With these fundamental changes, there will be many differing views and visions. Regardless whether those differences are big or small, at this scale, this many participants could only agree to disagree. A simple vote-counting would not be able to establish any kind of consensus besides vetoes, what would only undermine and disrupt the consultation. Wikipedia is not a vote for a good reason. On the other hand, the true model of consensus, which evaluates the merits of the comments is simply unmanageable above a few dozen participants. Neither of these models could achieve consensus or equally consider every community and contributor. The purpose of the consultations is not to struggle seeking global consensus with many differing views, but to gather constructive feedback from the communities. It is clear that the Foundation and the Working Groups are asking for meritable comments, which they can incorporate in their proposals. I remain concerned about the current timeline for this strategy process. I Continuous consultations about individual projects and specific implementations would be of great benefit to bridging the gap between the Foundation and the communities. However, only experience will prove the changes beneficial, procrastinating the decision would be just a waste of time and opportunity. It seems to be an easy way out to run votes endlessly, without doing the hard work to achieve the movement's targets, but it leads nowhere, just creates disruption. That's not why we are here. Although I can't vouch for all, I believe we are here to improve the projects we work on and to collaboratively create the world's biggest encyclopedia and knowledge platform, which shows an example of what's possible, that makes us proud. Perhaps an early phase could focus on reviewing our current mechanisms for The governance processes haven't seen a significant update since the initial influx of editors, but these processes and the technical tools did not scale with the sudden increase in editor count. A significant technical debt <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt> has been carried along for more than a decade. These processes need significant updates to address the abuse (bullying and occasional harassment) of editors, who aren't protected by the network of supportive editors who have known them for years. Addressing this issue is fundamental to improving diversity and editing experience within the communities. Although the issues faced by Wikipedia are the same as in any online community, many communities - most notably open source communities - have progressed significantly in regards of addressing abuse and conduct issues. Perhaps the strategy process organizers will have some recommendations for Aron

Hello Pine, On Wed, 22 Jan 2020 at 08:06, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: My knowledge about Superprotect is khm... superficial (no pun intended), from recollections and some randomly read discussions, but you made me interested to deepen my knowledge. Could you reference the arguments that you were reminded of, together with my specific comments that you associated with it, so I can better understand your comment? Regarding my comments: these are original thoughts based on researching policies and guidelines, the actual application of those, user feedback from editors (present and former) and impressions from readers. The extent of my research pales in comparison to those made by the WMF, therefore I focus on topics where I've acquired enough knowledge that my opinion and vision have taken form. Superprotect is not one of those topics, but maybe one day it will be. Thank you for asking. I'm happy (this week ;-) that someone shows an interest in these discussions. My hope is that there will be a global project for volunteers motivated in researching and improving the efficiency of governance practices, creating recommendations in cooperation with the WMF. Similar to the working groups - if you wish -, with significantly more volunteer participation and a focus on implementation details, not high-level concepts. My interest is more localized than what you expect as I'm not interested in questions of high-level governance of the all-Wikiverse such as budgets, representation, and global structures. The devil is in the details, that's where my focus is: I believe *how* we implement the Medium-term plan <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019> will determine which targets are met. I've experienced the need to meet some of those targets and understand others' need for the rest. I wish to put my 2 cents into the implementation. In this spirit, I've advocated for transparency and cooperation between the communities and the WMF in the office actions consultation which you can read here <https://xtools.wmflabs.org/topedits/meta.wikimedia.org/Aron_Manning/1/Talk:Office%20actions/Community%20consultation%20on%20partial%20and%20temporary%20office%20actions/09%202019> (in chronological order) and drafted a design proposal <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Aron_Manning/Design/Reporting_tool> for the planned User reporting system <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/User_reporting_system_consultation_2019> that yet again focuses on transparency while giving privacy to the reporter in the initial stages (before a report is evaluated) and making it technically possible to include limited non-public evidence. I would be delighted if you would share your thoughts on the discussion page. Aron

Hi Aron, I should be careful not to paint everyone with the same brush. I have great respect for WMF's mission. It would be difficult to have adequate legal support and technical infrastructure for Wikimedia projects without one or more organizations providing formal and ongoing support. WMF as an institution is something that I should distinguish from individuals who work for WMF, or individuals who are on the WMF Board. I think that there are some people at WMF who do excellent work. While I don't want to name them here, there are numerous employees who I think go above and beyond the call of duty to support the community and WMF's mission. Also, I should point out that Leila is a different from Lila. (In the past, I owed Leila money for misspelling her name.) However, all is not well. I don't enjoy the periodic clashes that happen between the community and WMF. Here are a couple of arguments from WMF in favor of SuperProtect, which was implemented to prevent local users from removing MediaViewer. I don't know that these same arguments would be made today, but WMF's statements regarding its unwelcome intervention in English Wikipedia's governance in 2019 give me a lot of reason to question how much respect WMF has for the English Wikipedia community and how well WMF knows English Wikipedia. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Media_Viewer/June… 2. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-August/073927.html I hope that this background information is helpful. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

On Sat, 25 Jan 2020 at 23:49, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Superprotect is now over five years old. Superprotect's removal is now over four years old. It was a mistake, and it was explicitly acknowledged as such: the then-ED of the WMF said it had "set up a precedent of mistrust". Almost all of the people involved in it are no longer affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, and in fact, plenty of the staff members at the Wikimedia Foundation were hired *after* superprotect was removed. I don't think bringing up superprotect in this discussion is especially relevant or helpful. Dan Source for most of the above: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Superprotect

I sort of want to agree with this, but actually I think it goes a bit deeper. If you ask questions about the relationship between the WMF and the community, sooner rather than later someone will talk about Superprotect. If you ask any of the 1,000 people who signed the petition against Superprotect, most of whom are still active one way or another, then Superprotect will probably be the first thing out of their mouths, even though it happened 6 years ago. It's sufficiently ingrained in peoples' minds that asking these people not to talk about Superprotect is like a British person asking someone from the USA not to talk about the Boston Tea Party. In part this is because people were very angry about the issue at the time, and that anger was dealt with very poorly at the time. In part it's because people perceive there is nothing to prevent an identical situation recurring. In some ways I think this perception is unfair, for all the reasons you mention. But it still exists, and in part it exists because of things the WMF has not done. The Foundation's expectations about how it interacts with the community remain fairly unclear and fairly undocumented, from the Board level down. I recall there have been some written statements of how the WMF now handles product features, though I think this didn't come the ED or less the Board. I don't believe there was ever a written review publilshed of Superprotect, while there are written reviews and statements lessons learned from many other situations that had much less impact. In short, the WMF is not seen as having put the issue to bed in a way that results in everyone involved moving on. Thanks, Chris

On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 08:57, Chris Keating &lt;chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: While MediaViewer's introduction wasn't prepared appropriately and superprotect was an inconsiderate, rushed and authoritarian solution to stop the wheel-warring, it is a fundamental issue of the community that such disagreements are always dealt with anger, combative actions and rushed decisions. The parallels with last year's Fram debacle are strong both on WMF's and the communities' side: no conversation, drama, wheel-warring again, immediately. This is how "collegial discussion" of differences should happen? I see this as a fundamental issue, that's strongly related to why so much harassment (and lesser forms of incivility) are part of our everyday editing experience (I'm talking about less-known members of the community, who aren't protected by their established status, not us). Those differences can't be dealt with anger, but only with level-headed, honest and just moderation. On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 11:23, Ziko van Dijk &lt;zvandijk(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: With experience in projects on this scale, one can understand that not all questions can be answered. While I wish the working group members would have engaged more in the discussions (kudos to the few, who did, thank you for showing an example to follow), it is very de-motivating to read negative comments written in a matter of minutes, that reject months of work with the strike of a few buttons, without making any effort to think about solutions to the problem and realizing how hard (impossible, in fact) it is to implement solutions that satisfy every individual's every need and concern. This is disrespectful to the hard work put into these recommendations and damaging to the motivation of the volunteers and staff members, who gave their time out of goodwill and -faith, and takes away from their time and energy to improve the recommendations. What I find disheartening about this is that most of the negative comments come from users, who opposed the 2017 Movement Direction <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction/Endorsement#Oppose>, which is the basis for the current recommendations. Although the first name is especially *not* representative of the "not constructive" comments, I would hope that who don't understand or share this vision, would express their "concerns" with less drama, respecting the work of those, who can imagine a future with a more friendly and diverse editing culture. Imagine, how helpful it would be if I were to approach users with authority, to ask them to assume good faith and treat newcomers with respect. It would cause some discord, which would turn into angry responses, which would eventually result in my de facto ban. As it did on enwiki. Fortunately, the consultations are a more civil atmosphere and there is space for negative comments, to a certain extent. * "you are not constructive" I don't know exactly what was implied with "déja vu" and fortunately, I haven't met the last response, that I strongly disagree with. The concern about some feedback not being constructive is, however, very valid, that I've reflected on above. Responses that give alternative solutions, highlight questions worth focusing on and generally *add* something to the proposals, can be incorporated into the proposals and many of those were included in the new iterations. The primary purpose is to incorporate the feedback and it is understandable, that there's no capacity to respond to everything and even feedback that found its way into the recommendations, won't necessarily be answered. That's how projects of this size work. Obviously, constructive comments will be answered first - that's rewarding and helpful to the process -, rather than effortless "I don't agree with this" responses, which is in fact not constructive, but very similar to the stonewalling <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Status_quo_stonewalling> patterns that often weigh heavily on discussions in the community. It is understandable, that every change awakens our basic fear of unpredictability. The future is unpredictable, what we can do is to give our best in manifesting every change. Instead of theorizing about what might be the result of the recommendations. To move forward we need to explore new possibilities, and if it's not giving the expected results, we need to move even further, until the desired results are accomplished. The best result is seldom the first result. We could learn from the success of SpaceX about how to achieve great things by moving fast, learning from the mistakes and moving on. Kind regards Aron

A big part of the problem is when these things are implemented, and people ask questions because they don't know what is going on, they are often met by complete absence of response from anyone at WMF, or in the case of the strategy, whoever it was that published the stuff for comment. I agree that there is an unreasonable expectation for instant response, but really it does not take much planning to ensure that someone is available to answer immediate questions, which would probably prevent most situations from going critical. Then someone presents a boilerplate non-answer from a group username and the shit hits the fan. Sure, we have our drama queens. By now the WMF should have noticed the pattern, and made a plan to work within the reality. Really poor PR demonstrating a lack of understanding of the audience. Cheers, Peter -----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Aron Manning Sent: 04 February 2020 13:56 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy: Recommendations and community conversations launching next week On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 08:57, Chris Keating &lt;chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: While MediaViewer's introduction wasn't prepared appropriately and superprotect was an inconsiderate, rushed and authoritarian solution to stop the wheel-warring, it is a fundamental issue of the community that such disagreements are always dealt with anger, combative actions and rushed decisions. The parallels with last year's Fram debacle are strong both on WMF's and the communities' side: no conversation, drama, wheel-warring again, immediately. This is how "collegial discussion" of differences should happen? I see this as a fundamental issue, that's strongly related to why so much harassment (and lesser forms of incivility) are part of our everyday editing experience (I'm talking about less-known members of the community, who aren't protected by their established status, not us). Those differences can't be dealt with anger, but only with level-headed, honest and just moderation. On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 11:23, Ziko van Dijk &lt;zvandijk(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: With experience in projects on this scale, one can understand that not all questions can be answered. While I wish the working group members would have engaged more in the discussions (kudos to the few, who did, thank you for showing an example to follow), it is very de-motivating to read negative comments written in a matter of minutes, that reject months of work with the strike of a few buttons, without making any effort to think about solutions to the problem and realizing how hard (impossible, in fact) it is to implement solutions that satisfy every individual's every need and concern. This is disrespectful to the hard work put into these recommendations and damaging to the motivation of the volunteers and staff members, who gave their time out of goodwill and -faith, and takes away from their time and energy to improve the recommendations. What I find disheartening about this is that most of the negative comments come from users, who opposed the 2017 Movement Direction <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction/Endorsement#Oppose>, which is the basis for the current recommendations. Although the first name is especially *not* representative of the "not constructive" comments, I would hope that who don't understand or share this vision, would express their "concerns" with less drama, respecting the work of those, who can imagine a future with a more friendly and diverse editing culture. Imagine, how helpful it would be if I were to approach users with authority, to ask them to assume good faith and treat newcomers with respect. It would cause some discord, which would turn into angry responses, which would eventually result in my de facto ban. As it did on enwiki. Fortunately, the consultations are a more civil atmosphere and there is space for negative comments, to a certain extent. * "you are not constructive" I don't know exactly what was implied with "déja vu" and fortunately, I haven't met the last response, that I strongly disagree with. The concern about some feedback not being constructive is, however, very valid, that I've reflected on above. Responses that give alternative solutions, highlight questions worth focusing on and generally *add* something to the proposals, can be incorporated into the proposals and many of those were included in the new iterations. The primary purpose is to incorporate the feedback and it is understandable, that there's no capacity to respond to everything and even feedback that found its way into the recommendations, won't necessarily be answered. That's how projects of this size work. Obviously, constructive comments will be answered first - that's rewarding and helpful to the process -, rather than effortless "I don't agree with this" responses, which is in fact not constructive, but very similar to the stonewalling <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Status_quo_stonewalling> patterns that often weigh heavily on discussions in the community. It is understandable, that every change awakens our basic fear of unpredictability. The future is unpredictable, what we can do is to give our best in manifesting every change. Instead of theorizing about what might be the result of the recommendations. To move forward we need to explore new possibilities, and if it's not giving the expected results, we need to move even further, until the desired results are accomplished. The best result is seldom the first result. We could learn from the success of SpaceX about how to achieve great things by moving fast, learning from the mistakes and moving on. Kind regards Aron _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> -- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com

This seems a reasonably prudent path. Cheers, Peter -----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Monday, February 10, 2020 6:14 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy: Recommendations and community conversations launching next week I've been reading sections of the strategy document with a couple of thoughts in mind. * The relatively decentralized nature of the community makes negotiations challenging, both within the community and between the community and WMF. * Clashes between the community and WMF are usually lose-lose situations. Even for the side that eventually comes out on top, I think that there is a lot of stress, a lot of time lost, a lot of damage to assumptions of good faith, and a lot of unhappiness. In my brief search of the strategy document: * I think that the quality of the strategy document is more uniform than the quality of the working group draft recommendations, and the document is generally readable. Thanks very much to the people who contributed time and effort to produce a generally coherent document that can be used as a basis for discussions. * I have seen some descriptions of problems that I think are generally good. * I have not seen proposals that I think are likely to result in significantly improved relations between the community and WMF. There is some discussion of improving the efficiency of global discussions, but that would be difficult to do and is a separate issue from improving relations between the community and WMF. * There are multiple calls for changes that would cost many thousands of hours of volunteers' time to design, even assuming that there was consensus that the changes should be made. I think that the ambition here is unwise. * There are some proposals which are unlikely to get consensus. Even assuming that there is consensus in principle, getting consensus on implementation would be difficult. The best way forward, I think, would be to have the community as a whole and individual wiki communities adopt portions of the recommendations as they think best. There may be a few proposals which the community is willing to adopt globally through requests for comment on Meta. Proposals which are not adopted globally may be adopted by local consensus so long as they do not conflict with global policy. The WMF Board may want to adopt portions of the document for WMF's use. At this point, I would encourage WMF instead to wait to see what the community does with the recommendations. When the community decides to move forward with portions of the recommendations globally and/or locally, WMF can then offer to support those initiatives in ways that have community consensus. Patience will be required, but I think that this path will lead to the most harmonious and sustained progress. The alternatives involve more opportunities for chaos, frustration, and WMF-community conflict; please, let's not go there. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>