Hi all, for those of you who do not watch the RecentChanges on the Foundation wiki https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges, I think it might be somehow surprising to see that in a top-level decision, almost all volunteer administrators of the wiki have been stripped off their adminship yesterday evening (UTC time).
As far as I know, community members have been helping out maintaining this wiki for as long as 2006, spending countless hours of their free time on categorising existing pages, importing translations from Meta, and recently, deleting unnecessary and broken pages left over by WMF staff.
Apparently, this is something that not only isn't appreciated, but unwelcome. Let me repeat that: the WMF does not wish volunteers to help out with running their wiki, even if they have been helping out almost since the very start of the wiki.
Some questions come to my mind right now:
1) Who made the decision to remove adminship from all community members? (I'm assuming it was Gayle, but it could've be someone from the Communications department for all we know.) 2) Why did you make this decision now? What changed? 3) Why did you decide to desysop people straight away instead of discussing things with them first?
These are questions directed at the WMF—for you regular folks, I have a riddle (I'll give a WikiLove barnstar to the first person to submit a correct answer). There is /at least/ one community member who does not hold any official position within the WMF, and who has not been desysopped in yesterday's purge—do you know who this person is?
-- Tomasz
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
--- Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle
The same happend to the Wikimedia Blog.
Most of the moderators where volunteers (and the only real active ones also). My moderator rights where removed and I have to go after that myself, I didn't got a message or anything.
While I was list administrator for wikitech-l I got the mail also that I needed to give my password so that the list can be run by the staff. I didn't respond to that mail (Thought it was spam cause It was send by gmail). \
It gives me the feeling that we need a bigger fundraiser cause people GET PAYED for doing things other people DO FOR FREE.
Huib
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:15 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
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On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Huib Laurens sterkebak@gmail.com wrote:
... (Thought it was spam cause It was send by gmail). \ ...
Wait.. what the..., Staff aren't using their wmf accounts for stuff like that? which means the emails aren't archived properly...
This sort of tone might be appropriate coming from HR in a bank or something, but I'm tremendously disappointed that something so tactless and rude was sent out from a senior officer in the Foundation to its volunteers. I know Gayle is a new hire, so I'm assuming good faith that she wasn't aware that taking this sort of attitude with volunteers would go down like a lead balloon.
Someone at the WMF needs to take Gayle into an office and patiently explain to her that the volunteers whose access she just "disabled, effective immediately" are the same ones that keep the websites that per her salary going.
Cheers, Craig Franklin
On 11 May 2013 21:15, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Having an HR & IR background myself, I am most surprised that the person for managing TALENT and CULTURE would take such a move without even so much as consulting with the community who keep the WMF's presence on the internet working, nor without giving them an actual reason as to why this has occurred.
I can only encourage Karen to either 1) explain why this was an absolutely necessary step to make, or 2) reverse those actions.
Russavia
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
This sort of tone might be appropriate coming from HR in a bank or something, but I'm tremendously disappointed that something so tactless and rude was sent out from a senior officer in the Foundation to its volunteers. I know Gayle is a new hire, so I'm assuming good faith that she wasn't aware that taking this sort of attitude with volunteers would go down like a lead balloon.
Someone at the WMF needs to take Gayle into an office and patiently explain to her that the volunteers whose access she just "disabled, effective immediately" are the same ones that keep the websites that per her salary going.
Cheers, Craig Franklin
On 11 May 2013 21:15, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
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Apologies, I mean Gayle, not Karen.
Russavia
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 8:14 PM, Russavia russavia.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Having an HR & IR background myself, I am most surprised that the person for managing TALENT and CULTURE would take such a move without even so much as consulting with the community who keep the WMF's presence on the internet working, nor without giving them an actual reason as to why this has occurred.
I can only encourage Karen to either 1) explain why this was an absolutely necessary step to make, or 2) reverse those actions.
Russavia
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
This sort of tone might be appropriate coming from HR in a bank or something, but I'm tremendously disappointed that something so tactless and rude was sent out from a senior officer in the Foundation to its volunteers. I know Gayle is a new hire, so I'm assuming good faith that she wasn't aware that taking this sort of attitude with volunteers would go down like a lead balloon.
Someone at the WMF needs to take Gayle into an office and patiently explain to her that the volunteers whose access she just "disabled, effective immediately" are the same ones that keep the websites that per her salary going.
Cheers, Craig Franklin
On 11 May 2013 21:15, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised by this at all. The message is clear - the community doesn't belong here. Go back to meta.
I'll be interested to see how long the WMF wiki will last before they hit their first massive technical problem happens and they need to call in a volunteer to fix it.
Deryck
On 11 May 2013 12:15, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Can we please give time to the Foundation to response and express their side before everyone starts to attack them? I think we had enough of that on Internal-l.
After the first response, or at least 24h, I will understand everyone feelings about that. (And right now I'm also don't agree or understand WMF's decision, but I'm waiting to hear them first).
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 4:46 PM, Deryck Chan deryckchan@wikimedia.hkwrote:
Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised by this at all. The message is clear - the community doesn't belong here. Go back to meta.
I'll be interested to see how long the WMF wiki will last before they hit their first massive technical problem happens and they need to call in a volunteer to fix it.
Deryck
On 11 May 2013 12:15, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. <
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. <
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Itzik Edri wrote:
Can we please give time to the Foundation to response and express their side before everyone starts to attack them? I think we had enough of that on Internal-l.
After the first response, or at least 24h, I will understand everyone feelings about that. (And right now I'm also don't agree or understand WMF's decision, but I'm waiting to hear them first).
I agree that it would be nice to have a full explanation from the Wikimedia Foundation here (particularly from Philippe and Gayle, who have apparently conspired).
But I'm not sure I agree that time is needed to evaluate what has happened. There was certainly no wait before users were stripped of their user rights. The lack of any emergency makes this rash series of actions even more upsetting and confusing.
Wikimedia _is_ its community. When a few staff members start to kick out the community (from the blog, from Bugzilla, from volunteer sysadminning), it's a pretty awful situation that needs to be immediately addressed, in my opinion. The alternative is that most volunteers will simply go away. While that may seem like a victory to certain staff members, I wonder when they'll realize that it's these same volunteers that keep the projects running. When the dedicated and trusted volunteers leave, their (paid) jobs will soon follow. Wikimedia simply isn't sustainable without trusted volunteers. Slapping them in the face does what?
MZMcBride
Deryck Chan wrote:
Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised by this at all. The message is clear - the community doesn't belong here. Go back to meta.
Yeah, I think you're right. It seems to be part of a larger pattern.
* Blog access has been restricted (as noted). * Bugzilla adminship has been restricted to staff only. * wikimediafoundation.org adminship is now restricted to staff and Board Members. * Shell access has been restricted to staff only (no more volunteer sysadmins).
Relatedly, the Toolserver is being slowly killed in favor of a controlled sandbox called "Wikimedia Labs" and all Wikimedia accounts are being unified (with forceable usurps/renames) to make it easier to track and control users across all Wikimedia wikis.
It's very surprising that the Board has been so quiet about all of this. Generally, a few staff members (notably Philippe and his team) have tried to create "tiers" in which paid staff are above volunteers. Even the most trusted volunteers are no longer allowed to hold positions of trust within the Wikimedia community. This is very bad. Are there ways to address this?
But to blame this on Gayle is kind of insane. It seems clear to me that she's being used as a pawn here. There are very few indications that this has anything to do with her, aside from a few log entries (from... Philippe) inexplicably pointing to her name. And the curt e-mail she sent out to affected users. Her involvement with the wiki would charitably be described as negligible.
The director of _community advocacy_ (Philippe) is stripping nearly every community member of user rights. And yet there's still no provided rationale for the change in policy, other than it being based on a series of private discussions. Meanwhile, the home page of wikimediafoundation.org stresses how transparent the organization is.
This is a pretty disappointing day. I'd be interested to hear what Gayle, Philippe, or the Board has to say.
MZMcBride
On 11 May 2013 15:36, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Yeah, I think you're right. It seems to be part of a larger pattern.
+ Withdrawal of the ability to use WMF logos/ wordmarks in community projects, such as QRpedia.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
On 11 May 2013 14:46, Deryck Chan deryckchan@wikimedia.hk wrote:
Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised by this at all.
Sad to say, this chimes with the Foundation's recent decision to consult on changes to en.Wikipedia's method of notifying users that they have a talk page message, and then to reject the overwhelming consensus (to return the familiar orange bar, at least while other options are discussed) of that consultation.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
Gayle is travelling today and not online, so I'll take a crack at responding to this.
The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the blog). We are grateful to get community help there, and a small number of community members do really good work with us on both the WMF wiki and the blog. But ultimately that wiki, and the blog, are our responsibility, and we are accountable for making sure that e.g. the staff page, the Board bios, the resolution texts, etc., are maintained and in good shape. Most material on the WMF is not created via collaborative production processes -- it's "corporate" in nature, meaning that it is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, for an audience of Wikimedia Foundation stakeholders, which includes community members and prospective community members, donors, readers of the projects, media, and others.
My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic editing rights. My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff who work on the Foundation wiki have been grateful (and are grateful) for the help they've gotten from community members in maintaining the Foundation wiki, and that we hope they'll continue to help us. They've been great, and we're grateful.
But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think that's ever been a huge problem: I don't think we've ever had a situation in which extensive discussion hasn't reached an okay conclusion. But, the extensive discussions --which, I understand, have typically been one-on-one, by which I mean, not a large number of community members or a community consensus against something the Foundation has wanted to do, but rather one volunteer disagreeing with something staff have been asked to do as part of their job --- occasionally, those discussions have been extremely time-consuming. That's not good. The staff working on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki have jobs they've got to get done, in support of the entire movement. If they spend days or weeks needing to persuade a single community member of the merits of something they want to do on the Foundation wiki, or if they need to modify their plans extensively to accommodate the opinions of a single community member, that reduces the amount of time available for them to do the rest of their work. Which, I repeat, is in the service of the movement overall.
So I would say this:
This decision is not about "the community" versus "the WMF." This decision is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work on the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness. This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities. On the projects, the volunteers are the editorial leads, and the WMF plays a supporting role by creating functionality, maintaining the servers, paying the bandwidth bills, and so forth. On the WMF wiki, the WMF is the editorial lead, and volunteers can (and do) play a supporting role helping staff organize pages, maintain pages, and so forth. That's a reasonable division, and I think having clarity around it is a good thing.
Slightly more broadly: when the Wikimedia movement was very young, everybody did everything and there wasn't much division of roles-and-responsibilities. I remember when the Wikimedia Foundation budgets were prepared by volunteers, when the trademarks were managed by volunteers, and so forth. That was appropriate for the time, and even though it was messy, it was kind of great. Then we all went through a period in which roles-and-responsibilities were utterly unclear -- it wasn't at all obvious who should do what, and many roles-and-responsibilities were hotly disputed. Personally, I feel like we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We don't pay staff to edit the projects: staff who edit do it on their own time, as a hobby or special personal interest. We do pay staff to do things that are better done by staff than by volunteers, such as managing the trademark portfolio. Some volunteers (such as Domas) have very special privileges and powers, because they've proved over time they are exceptionally skilled. Some volunteers support the Wikimedia Foundation staff in their work in a variety of ways, because they've proved their interest and abilities. Some work happens in close partnership between staff and volunteers, such as production of blog posts, speaking with the media, and in projects such as the Global Ed one. Sometimes organized groups of volunteers are created by volunteers and supported by staff (e.g. ArbCom or AffCom) and sometimes organized groups of volunteers are created by the Wikimedia Foundation and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation (such as the FDC). Upshot: community members and Wikimedia Foundation staff work together in many different coordinated fashions. The ways on which we work together are becoming increasingly clear, and I think that clarity is good.
So. People can disagree with this decision, and that's okay. But ultimately, the Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki: it's our job to figure out how best to manage and maintain it. That's what we're doing here.
Thanks, Sue On May 11, 2013 4:15 AM, "K. Peachey" p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Sue Gardner wrote:
So. People can disagree with this decision, and that's okay. But ultimately, the Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki: it's our job to figure out how best to manage and Maintain it. That's what we're doing here.
wikimediafoundation.org has historically been managed by the Board. Not Gayle or Philippe.
I'm still waiting on the Board to chime in here. It's my understanding that several Board members (current and former) wanted to open the wiki to more editing and cleanup in the short-term and in the long-term re-unite the wiki with Meta-Wiki at www.wikimedia.org.
This is a step in the wrong direction.
MZMcBride
I'm not going to respond to all the points raised in your e-mail, Sue (partially because most of them are just too general), so let me just mentioned some of them.
The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the blog).
Then it should perhaps be renamed as the Wikimedia Foundation Blog With Guests Post from Community Members.
We are grateful to get community help there, and a small number of community members do really good work with us on both the WMF wiki and the blog. But ultimately that wiki, and the blog, are our responsibility, and we are accountable for making sure that e.g. the staff page, the Board bios, the resolution texts, etc., are maintained and in good shape. Most material on the WMF is not created via collaborative production processes -- it's "corporate" in nature, meaning that it is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, for an audience of Wikimedia Foundation stakeholders, which includes community members and prospective community members, donors, readers of the projects, media, and others.
Well, then I am still surprised to see you thank those volunteers for their work in this matter—by desysopping them all in one, unannounced and not discussed user rights purge.
The most important reason why all those pages that you mention, Sue, are maintained and in good shape is that community members have been very often driving changes, helping with importing translations, and making thousands of small changes (be it typos, categorisation or design-like).
Seeing that there aren't any WMF employees who contributed as much time and work as some community members (with the possible exception of Philippe and Heather), I'm puzzled to see you make this decision.
This having been written, I would like to reiterate my questions again (and add another one):
1) Who made the decision to remove adminship from all community members? 2) Why did you make this decision now? What changed? 3) Why did you decide to desysop people straight away instead of discussing things with them first? 4) /NEW/ Who precisely (what department) is responsible for the maintenance of the wiki, and why didn't they perform their roles before?
-- Tomasz
Argh, why do we have to keep going through this over and over again? I'm sure we're long past the point where Sue and many members of the staff are convinced that they will be attacked by someone in reaction to any decision they could make. Maybe that's true, but its no excuse for transforming such a picayune change into a drama bomb through the utter failure to manage the implementation of a change that affects dedicated volunteers. An advanced notice, an explanation, a thank you, an expression of hope that volunteers will continue to help. That's all it would have taken to preserve this as what it ought to have been, a non-issue. Instead, they received a terse and impersonal notice after the fact that amounted to the corporate version of ordering someone off your lawn.
Now we have an explanation, but it's a bit late - and it comes in place of what the first WMF response ought to have been, an apology for once again bungling an interaction with volunteers. Not all that long ago the WMF seemed to consider ahead of time the potential reaction of volunteers, and to tailor actions and communication to limit the chance of anger, disappointment and hurt feelings among them. Perhaps it was a natural, and unspoken, priority at a time when many WMF leaders were volunteers and former volunteers. Maybe we're past that point, and the WMF needs to begin actively pushing this ethos into the organizational culture of both staff and volunteer leadership groups.
Thanks a lot for this explanation.
On the other side, wikis not only need content producers (here WMF) but also curators (wikignomes) who are sorting the pages, deleting and moving pages, typocorrecting, templating things, helping new users in formatting texts, etc. (I read some of the Florence’s blogposts :) -- and not being admin restricts a lot the possible actions.
And on the example you give about disagreement between two editors (e.g. staffer and volunteer), in theory there is no reason the staffer’s solution is better or worse than the volunteer’s solution, but perhaps a mean solution can be better than any of the two initial solutions; and in this case, the spent time is not a waste of time.
Sébastien
Le Sat, 11 May 2013 18:48:38 +0200, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org a écrit:
Gayle is travelling today and not online, so I'll take a crack at responding to this.
The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the blog). We are grateful to get community help there, and a small number of community members do really good work with us on both the WMF wiki and the blog. But ultimately that wiki, and the blog, are our responsibility, and we are accountable for making sure that e.g. the staff page, the Board bios, the resolution texts, etc., are maintained and in good shape. Most material on the WMF is not created via collaborative production processes -- it's "corporate" in nature, meaning that it is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, for an audience of Wikimedia Foundation stakeholders, which includes community members and prospective community members, donors, readers of the projects, media, and others.
My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic editing rights. My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff who work on the Foundation wiki have been grateful (and are grateful) for the help they've gotten from community members in maintaining the Foundation wiki, and that we hope they'll continue to help us. They've been great, and we're grateful.
But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think that's ever been a huge problem: I don't think we've ever had a situation in which extensive discussion hasn't reached an okay conclusion. But, the extensive discussions --which, I understand, have typically been one-on-one, by which I mean, not a large number of community members or a community consensus against something the Foundation has wanted to do, but rather one volunteer disagreeing with something staff have been asked to do as part of their job --- occasionally, those discussions have been extremely time-consuming. That's not good. The staff working on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki have jobs they've got to get done, in support of the entire movement. If they spend days or weeks needing to persuade a single community member of the merits of something they want to do on the Foundation wiki, or if they need to modify their plans extensively to accommodate the opinions of a single community member, that reduces the amount of time available for them to do the rest of their work. Which, I repeat, is in the service of the movement overall.
So I would say this:
This decision is not about "the community" versus "the WMF." This decision is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work on the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness. This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities. On the projects, the volunteers are the editorial leads, and the WMF plays a supporting role by creating functionality, maintaining the servers, paying the bandwidth bills, and so forth. On the WMF wiki, the WMF is the editorial lead, and volunteers can (and do) play a supporting role helping staff organize pages, maintain pages, and so forth. That's a reasonable division, and I think having clarity around it is a good thing.
Slightly more broadly: when the Wikimedia movement was very young, everybody did everything and there wasn't much division of roles-and-responsibilities. I remember when the Wikimedia Foundation budgets were prepared by volunteers, when the trademarks were managed by volunteers, and so forth. That was appropriate for the time, and even though it was messy, it was kind of great. Then we all went through a period in which roles-and-responsibilities were utterly unclear -- it wasn't at all obvious who should do what, and many roles-and-responsibilities were hotly disputed. Personally, I feel like we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We don't pay staff to edit the projects: staff who edit do it on their own time, as a hobby or special personal interest. We do pay staff to do things that are better done by staff than by volunteers, such as managing the trademark portfolio. Some volunteers (such as Domas) have very special privileges and powers, because they've proved over time they are exceptionally skilled. Some volunteers support the Wikimedia Foundation staff in their work in a variety of ways, because they've proved their interest and abilities. Some work happens in close partnership between staff and volunteers, such as production of blog posts, speaking with the media, and in projects such as the Global Ed one. Sometimes organized groups of volunteers are created by volunteers and supported by staff (e.g. ArbCom or AffCom) and sometimes organized groups of volunteers are created by the Wikimedia Foundation and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation (such as the FDC). Upshot: community members and Wikimedia Foundation staff work together in many different coordinated fashions. The ways on which we work together are becoming increasingly clear, and I think that clarity is good.
So. People can disagree with this decision, and that's okay. But ultimately, the Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki: it's our job to figure out how best to manage and maintain it. That's what we're doing here.
Thanks, Sue On May 11, 2013 4:15 AM, "K. Peachey" p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. < https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
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On 5/11/13 8:01 PM, Seb35 wrote:
Thanks a lot for this explanation.
On the other side, wikis not only need content producers (here WMF) but also curators (wikignomes) who are sorting the pages, deleting and moving pages, typocorrecting, templating things, helping new users in formatting texts, etc. (I read some of the Florence’s blogposts :) -- and not being admin restricts a lot the possible actions.
Yeah ! :-)
As a side note, Philippe has apparently restored my admin status (I did not ask any special favor) upon the reason that I am on the Advisory Board.
But let me put it this way...
I do not buy the argument offered by Sue that "But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki."
Sorry Sue... but this is a very poor argument. If there is a problem with ONE or TWO editors (was there at least two ?) then the way to go is to talk with this editor, not to remove all volunteer administrators who have been helping nicely for so many years.
In the past, we used to talk about soft security as opposed to hard security. Hard security was about passwords, rights, filters, walls, blocking, deleting and such. Soft security was about conversations, peer reviews, reversions, recent changes, and other collaborative transparent processes. We have been going on for over 10 years primarily relying on soft security. And it did not work so badly in the end. Because for one bad person, and one confused, there were swarms of good people. Is not that sad that staff decided that soft security was no more the way to go, and that implementing hard security to prevent problems with ONE or TWO people was a better way than relying upon dozen of good people and spending a little bit of time discussing with the confused ?
The decision made by staff make it appear that volunteers are more an inconvenience than a help.
I can not blame a staff member to feel this way if he had to spent some time arguing with a volunteer whilst he had a mandate to do something specific and the volunteer was preventing it (whether a good or bad idea). It can be very annoying ;)
However, I feel that management and board should have a slightly higher view on the matter and should realize how much they actually DO NEED the volunteers to BE happy and to FEEL useful and appreciated (See the recent discussion related to Wikimedia Hong Kong) and to reflect whether the long term outcome of the decision to remove admin rights to volunteers on the foundation wiki (and blog if I understood well) is a good idea or not.
Alternatively, it might be good to really move as much as possible of the Wikimedia Foundation Wiki to meta (where at least, the community is in charge of who is admin and who is not).
Flo
PS: however, do note that it is a good idea to remove admin flags from users who quit the community entirely.
On 12 May 2013 18:47, Florence Devouard anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Alternatively, it might be good to really move as much as possible of the Wikimedia Foundation Wiki to meta (where at least, the community is in charge of who is admin and who is not).
This is a good idea anyway.
Having the WMF wiki become a staff-controlled operation is not an outlandish or terrible idea - it's the official site of the nonprofit itself, after all. But this was not a good way to do it.
That said, there are projects who do much worse. Here's GNOME's attempt to win the XFree86 Memorial Award for Community Management for 2013: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544
- d.
On 5/12/13 8:13 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 12 May 2013 18:47, Florence Devouard anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Alternatively, it might be good to really move as much as possible of the Wikimedia Foundation Wiki to meta (where at least, the community is in charge of who is admin and who is not).
This is a good idea anyway.
Having the WMF wiki become a staff-controlled operation is not an outlandish or terrible idea - it's the official site of the nonprofit itself, after all. But this was not a good way to do it.
That said, there are projects who do much worse. Here's GNOME's attempt to win the XFree86 Memorial Award for Community Management for 2013: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544
- d.
:) Yeah, pretty bad.
The main reason I would consider WMF wiki SHOULD NOT be an entirely staff-controlled and operated site is the fact we originally wanted it to be at least in part multilingual.
Current staff does not seem to be very interested in that original wish.
Some requests for translation are sometimes made but lot's of outdated content is still over there. Sometimes, it does not matter too much. Other times, it is quite unfortunate. Check out for example http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
Important ? yes Should be translated ? I would say "yes, as much as possible" Should old versions stick there ? I would say vehemently "no, should not"
Still, many languages still display the old version. The staff will hide itself behind the fact that "only the English version matters". Which is why Dutch is still the old version: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacybeleid Is that good ? No, I would say it is "not serious".
Who can help clean that up ? Well... if not the volunteers, then it would have to be the staff job. Except I doubt the staff would consider that to be part of its job. If only because staff does not speak 300 languages.
What's the best way to motivate volunteers to help with translation and update of non-English content ? I am not sure, but probably not in removing their admin bit as if they were dangerous people. Right now, I would go as far as saying that WMF on the contrary should look out for more people to help clean up ;)
How does that happen right now ? Well, volunteers do ask on meta to get an account for WMF wiki. Where ? Here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Request_for_an_account_on_the_Foundation_wiki
And guess who is taking care of giving them access ? A volunteer who has the technical means to create them accounts. Oh wait... not any more. Ah, hum. Well, I take it a staff member will do that in the future :)
-------
Alternatively, the staff, with the official support of their management and the board can decide that the Foundation wiki should not try any more to be translated in other languages and should stick to what it actually is: a US-based non profit company.
Translations may be non-official... and on meta.
-------
The multilingualism we hoped so dearly has always been an issue. It is poorly dealt with on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. Poorly dealt with on the Foundation Wiki. Poorly dealt with on OTRS.
:(
Florence
On 12 May 2013 19:44, Florence Devouard anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
:) Yeah, pretty bad.
The main reason I would consider WMF wiki SHOULD NOT be an entirely staff-controlled and operated site is the fact we originally wanted it to be at least in part multilingual.
Current staff does not seem to be very interested in that original wish.
Some requests for translation are sometimes made but lot's of outdated content is still over there. Sometimes, it does not matter too much. Other times, it is quite unfortunate. Check out for example http://wikimediafoundation.**org/wiki/Privacy_policyhttp://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
Important ? yes Should be translated ? I would say "yes, as much as possible" Should old versions stick there ? I would say vehemently "no, should not"
Still, many languages still display the old version. The staff will hide itself behind the fact that "only the English version matters". Which is why Dutch is still the old version: http://wikimediafoundation.**org/wiki/Privacybeleidhttp://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacybeleid Is that good ? No, I would say it is "not serious".
Who can help clean that up ? Well... if not the volunteers, then it would have to be the staff job. Except I doubt the staff would consider that to be part of its job. If only because staff does not speak 300 languages.
What's the best way to motivate volunteers to help with translation and update of non-English content ? I am not sure, but probably not in removing their admin bit as if they were dangerous people. Right now, I would go as far as saying that WMF on the contrary should look out for more people to help clean up ;)
How does that happen right now ? Well, volunteers do ask on meta to get an account for WMF wiki. Where ? Here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/** wiki/Request_for_an_account_**on_the_Foundation_wikihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Request_for_an_account_on_the_Foundation_wiki
And guess who is taking care of giving them access ? A volunteer who has the technical means to create them accounts. Oh wait... not any more. Ah, hum. Well, I take it a staff member will do that in the future :)
Alternatively, the staff, with the official support of their management and the board can decide that the Foundation wiki should not try any more to be translated in other languages and should stick to what it actually is: a US-based non profit company.
Translations may be non-official... and on meta.
The multilingualism we hoped so dearly has always been an issue. It is poorly dealt with on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. Poorly dealt with on the Foundation Wiki. Poorly dealt with on OTRS.
:(
For what it's worth, I did try to get some re-translation organised in early February: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF and asked communications staff at the WMF for their input. To be fair to them they did say that they'd look into it and get back to me but I think they might have been swamped with other things so it was forgotten.
Thehelpfulone, 12/05/2013 20:58:
For what it's worth, I did try to get some re-translation organised in early February: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF and asked communications staff at the WMF for their input. To be fair to them they did say that they'd look into it and get back to me but I think they might have been swamped with other things so it was forgotten.
I don't think staff has ever touched translation on WMF wiki, it's always been done by the almighty heroes Cbrown1023, Aphaia, Az1568 with their gazillion edits and a few others. It's unfair to think they'd have something to say. Meta has the Translate extension, the translators and the community. At this point it's clear that foundationwiki is going to rot, we should just set up all the policies and important documents on Meta for translation and start the work again; we've been stuck for too many years now. Eventually, the links will go where the value is and nobody will care about the wasteland at foundationwiki.
Nemo
On 12.05.2013 20:44, Florence Devouard wrote:
The multilingualism we hoped so dearly has always been an issue. It is poorly dealt with on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. Poorly dealt with on the Foundation Wiki. Poorly dealt with on OTRS.
:(
Florence
If someone approaches me and asks to write a blog post about the Russian Wikivoyage (where I happen to be an admin) I could do it in two or three languages. (I certainly can survive if nobody does).
On the other hand if I only write it in Russian - would it be such a good idea? From what I know, the number of Russian Wikimedians who read the blog on a regular basis is measured by a single digit.
Cheers Yaroslav
On 5/12/13 9:28 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
On 12.05.2013 20:44, Florence Devouard wrote:
The multilingualism we hoped so dearly has always been an issue. It is poorly dealt with on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. Poorly dealt with on the Foundation Wiki. Poorly dealt with on OTRS.
:(
Florence
If someone approaches me and asks to write a blog post about the Russian Wikivoyage (where I happen to be an admin) I could do it in two or three languages. (I certainly can survive if nobody does).
On the other hand if I only write it in Russian - would it be such a good idea? From what I know, the number of Russian Wikimedians who read the blog on a regular basis is measured by a single digit.
Cheers Yaroslav
Fortunately, we know that "numbers" is not always what matters ;)
Flo
On 12 May 2013 18:47, Florence Devouard anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Alternatively, it might be good to really move as much as possible of the Wikimedia Foundation Wiki to meta (where at least, the community is in charge of who is admin and who is not).
Mostly in charge, there are a few exceptions where adminship has been granted by WMF staff for their work without going through any formal community procedures: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Administrators#Temporary_adminship_or_a... .
On 5/12/13 8:26 PM, Thehelpfulone wrote:
On 12 May 2013 18:47, Florence Devouard anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Alternatively, it might be good to really move as much as possible of the Wikimedia Foundation Wiki to meta (where at least, the community is in charge of who is admin and who is not).
Mostly in charge, there are a few exceptions where adminship has been granted by WMF staff for their work without going through any formal community procedures: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Administrators#Temporary_adminship_or_a...
I do not see that as a really problematic issue. Unfortunate, but not really problematic. As long as the appointed admin behave within community rules and does "good", there is only damage to our pride and disrespect to the rules. But ... results over rules. Result is what matters. Rules is only a way to get there.
A serious problem would be * IF the staff was the one deciding who is admin generally * IF the staff was boldly removing admin access to volunteers
Still, if you want to be a bit pointy, you should probably mention that it is unclear why https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Smazeland still needs to be an admin
Flo
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic editing rights.
Far more than basic, actually. The WMF wiki is unusual in that it allows insertion of raw HTML by any registered user (this is because the donation forms used to be hosted there; they're now developed on a dedicated site). Regular users also have permission to edit the MediaWiki: namespace, which helps with translation. This means that regular users can add arbitrary code that will be executed in the reader's browser, something that only admins can do on most of our other wikis. There are >600 registered users on the WMF wiki.
While I understand the frustration with admin access being restricted, volunteers on this particular wiki are still trusted with extraordinary rights (without prejudice as to whether that configuration should be broadened or narrowed in future). I asked Philippe yesterday, and he said that account requests from Meta would continue to be processed (by JamesA and himself going forward). As Sue says, having the overall governance responsibilities on the wiki clarified is a normal step. Sorry for the rocky transition; no disrespect was intended.
The original text on https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Welcome (written in 2004 when there was no WMF staff) with regard to the Board resolving all disputes should indeed be updated; the Board delegates day-to-day operational responsibilities to the organizational staff, and while the sentence is technically true, it was written at a time when that delegation was not possible. Nonetheless, it was clear from the very beginning that the WMF wiki was not operated according to the community governance practices established in other wikis because it serves a distinct purpose.
Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Having read through this entire thread, I have to ask: would there have been any value in, instead of desysopping non-staff (because there appears to be a possibly-valid argument that non-staff did most of the administrative work on the wmf wiki), instead making it clear that unlike on all other wikis, +staff users had the final say in any administrative/editing dispute on the wmf wiki? That is, since Sue says a large part of the problem was non-staff making staff justify themselves and their decisions endlessly, why not just short-circuit that particular weak spot and otherwise let work carry on? I guess the operative questions here would be something like:
1. Was there actual misuse of admin tools being done by non-staff? 2. Were there other, non-misuse issues that arose from non-staff having +admin (i.e. we already know about "too many challenges to staff", but was there anything else that made non-staff admins suboptimal? this would include even things like "it looks weird to outsiders to have non-staff changing 'corporate' content") 3. If there weren't other issues, could the issue of "non-staff challenging staff decisions" have been corrected with a less-drastic solution (such as clarifying who had final say in things) 4. Is it true that non-staff admins do significant portions of the work on that wiki, such that their loss will now cause the wiki to go un- or more-poorly-maintained? 5. If 4 is true, what solutions can we/the WMF put in place to pick up that slack so the wiki doesn't become worse?
None of these questions are intended to apportion blame or determine who was "right", but they may help us figure out why actions are being done, how we could have routed around this huge blow-up, and where to go from here.
-Fluffernutter
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic
editing
rights.
Far more than basic, actually. The WMF wiki is unusual in that it allows insertion of raw HTML by any registered user (this is because the donation forms used to be hosted there; they're now developed on a dedicated site). Regular users also have permission to edit the MediaWiki: namespace, which helps with translation. This means that regular users can add arbitrary code that will be executed in the reader's browser, something that only admins can do on most of our other wikis. There are >600 registered users on the WMF wiki.
While I understand the frustration with admin access being restricted, volunteers on this particular wiki are still trusted with extraordinary rights (without prejudice as to whether that configuration should be broadened or narrowed in future). I asked Philippe yesterday, and he said that account requests from Meta would continue to be processed (by JamesA and himself going forward). As Sue says, having the overall governance responsibilities on the wiki clarified is a normal step. Sorry for the rocky transition; no disrespect was intended.
The original text on https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Welcome (written in 2004 when there was no WMF staff) with regard to the Board resolving all disputes should indeed be updated; the Board delegates day-to-day operational responsibilities to the organizational staff, and while the sentence is technically true, it was written at a time when that delegation was not possible. Nonetheless, it was clear from the very beginning that the WMF wiki was not operated according to the community governance practices established in other wikis because it serves a distinct purpose.
Erik
Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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Sue (or anyone from staff who is more precisely in charge for this), may you just revert this and open discussion to reach more sensible solution?
I understand that there could be a good reason for this action, but the way it's been handled is not the perfect one. And at least permissions on a wiki are not hard to revert. On May 11, 2013 6:48 PM, "Sue Gardner" sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
Gayle is travelling today and not online, so I'll take a crack at responding to this.
The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the blog). We are grateful to get community help there, and a small number of community members do really good work with us on both the WMF wiki and the blog. But ultimately that wiki, and the blog, are our responsibility, and we are accountable for making sure that e.g. the staff page, the Board bios, the resolution texts, etc., are maintained and in good shape. Most material on the WMF is not created via collaborative production processes -- it's "corporate" in nature, meaning that it is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, for an audience of Wikimedia Foundation stakeholders, which includes community members and prospective community members, donors, readers of the projects, media, and others.
My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic editing rights. My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff who work on the Foundation wiki have been grateful (and are grateful) for the help they've gotten from community members in maintaining the Foundation wiki, and that we hope they'll continue to help us. They've been great, and we're grateful.
But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think that's ever been a huge problem: I don't think we've ever had a situation in which extensive discussion hasn't reached an okay conclusion. But, the extensive discussions --which, I understand, have typically been one-on-one, by which I mean, not a large number of community members or a community consensus against something the Foundation has wanted to do, but rather one volunteer disagreeing with something staff have been asked to do as part of their job --- occasionally, those discussions have been extremely time-consuming. That's not good. The staff working on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki have jobs they've got to get done, in support of the entire movement. If they spend days or weeks needing to persuade a single community member of the merits of something they want to do on the Foundation wiki, or if they need to modify their plans extensively to accommodate the opinions of a single community member, that reduces the amount of time available for them to do the rest of their work. Which, I repeat, is in the service of the movement overall.
So I would say this:
This decision is not about "the community" versus "the WMF." This decision is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work on the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness. This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities. On the projects, the volunteers are the editorial leads, and the WMF plays a supporting role by creating functionality, maintaining the servers, paying the bandwidth bills, and so forth. On the WMF wiki, the WMF is the editorial lead, and volunteers can (and do) play a supporting role helping staff organize pages, maintain pages, and so forth. That's a reasonable division, and I think having clarity around it is a good thing.
Slightly more broadly: when the Wikimedia movement was very young, everybody did everything and there wasn't much division of roles-and-responsibilities. I remember when the Wikimedia Foundation budgets were prepared by volunteers, when the trademarks were managed by volunteers, and so forth. That was appropriate for the time, and even though it was messy, it was kind of great. Then we all went through a period in which roles-and-responsibilities were utterly unclear -- it wasn't at all obvious who should do what, and many roles-and-responsibilities were hotly disputed. Personally, I feel like we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We don't pay staff to edit the projects: staff who edit do it on their own time, as a hobby or special personal interest. We do pay staff to do things that are better done by staff than by volunteers, such as managing the trademark portfolio. Some volunteers (such as Domas) have very special privileges and powers, because they've proved over time they are exceptionally skilled. Some volunteers support the Wikimedia Foundation staff in their work in a variety of ways, because they've proved their interest and abilities. Some work happens in close partnership between staff and volunteers, such as production of blog posts, speaking with the media, and in projects such as the Global Ed one. Sometimes organized groups of volunteers are created by volunteers and supported by staff (e.g. ArbCom or AffCom) and sometimes organized groups of volunteers are created by the Wikimedia Foundation and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation (such as the FDC). Upshot: community members and Wikimedia Foundation staff work together in many different coordinated fashions. The ways on which we work together are becoming increasingly clear, and I think that clarity is good.
So. People can disagree with this decision, and that's okay. But ultimately, the Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki: it's our job to figure out how best to manage and maintain it. That's what we're doing here.
Thanks, Sue On May 11, 2013 4:15 AM, "K. Peachey" p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
Dear XXX, Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective immediately. Sincerely, Gayle -- Gayle Karen K. Young Chief Talent and Culture Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.310.8416 www.wikimediafoundation.org
Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in ~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses about knowing what these people do on the wiki
Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.
"We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and when they're needed for a specific task."
Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not as much thee days but it still happens.
Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange. since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls under the foundation)
[1]. <
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857&oldid=91855#Users...
[2]. <
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&am...
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights
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On 12/05/13 02:48, Sue Gardner wrote:
The staff working on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki have jobs they've got to get done, in support of the entire movement. If they spend days or weeks needing to persuade a single community member of the merits of something they want to do on the Foundation wiki, or if they need to modify their plans extensively to accommodate the opinions of a single community member, that reduces the amount of time available for them to do the rest of their work. Which, I repeat, is in the service of the movement overall.
So it was a response to a particular conflict?
My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff who work on the Foundation wiki have been grateful (and are grateful) for the help they've gotten from community members in maintaining the Foundation wiki, and that we hope they'll continue to help us.
Let's hope so. But in my experience, stripping titles such as "administrator" from volunteers is an excellent way to get them to leave. It's not really about the technical privileges, these titles are a recognition of good work done, and a symbol of trust, and are one of the few rewards we give to volunteers. Stripping privileges from a volunteer is upsetting, and undermines their core motivation for contributing.
So I can appreciate that the conflict needed to be resolved, but I have to wonder whether this was the best way to go about it.
-- Tim Starling
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:15 AM, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
For what it's worth, this didn't get sent out to everyone. I was a bureaucrat and administrator, and have the most edits on that wiki (afaik?), and wasn't notified. Like Huib, I was also in the batch of blog moderator removals and wasn't notified about that either.
I'm not very active anymore, so it's not really a huge deal, but it's still bad form to have not gotten any kind of notification at all.
-- Casey Brown (Cbrown1023) caseybrown.org
Casey Brown wrote:
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:15 AM, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
For what it's worth, this didn't get sent out to everyone. I was a bureaucrat and administrator, and have the most edits on that wiki (afaik?), and wasn't notified. Like Huib, I was also in the batch of blog moderator removals and wasn't notified about that either.
I'm left a little speechless by this. I've always considered my values to be largely aligned with Wikimedia's, but more and more, I find myself distanced from it. I don't really want to be associated with people who can't treat volunteers with basic respect and dignity. Ultimately, like every other volunteer, I have to evaluate whether my time is better spent elsewhere.
It's a really sad day for Wikimedia. You and many others who were summarily stripped of their user rights were integral to building that wiki and you deserve to be recognized and appreciated, not thrown out on a whim without notice or warning. Sue talks so much about stewardship, but this apparently includes anointing a ruler of the wiki who isn't capable of caring out her own commands. What does this say about the stewardship of the wiki? Meanwhile the questions about who will actually keep the site running go unanswered.
For people like Gayle and Philippe to privately collude and then fire us at the end of the day on a Friday like we're disgruntled employees was pretty bad. (Both of whom seemed to have been in such a rush to act, but now are mysteriously too busy to participate in the community mailing list discussion about their actions.) Watching Erik and Sue try to defend their actions has been even more painful to watch. But it's long-time community members who know that this isn't right and who have chosen to not say anything that are bothering me the most.
It's unsurprising that you and many others aren't very active anymore. :-/ You're so much better than they deserve.
MZMcBride
Wow, this was definitely a huge brick they dropped there... It seems, the WMF needs to hire someone (a diplomat) to counsel them about actions towards the volunteers. (Seriously!) Well, and when we are at it, the volunteer community might need a diplomat, too, one who counsels them about actions and role of the WMF, before they start complaining about any of it. :)
Anyway, nothing would have been lost if Gayle had written to the folks a few weeks before the actual action was performed, informing that this is the plan and why. It's not necessary, WMF owns the page and can do just about everything there, but just for politeness it would have been nice. And yes, the email that - seemingly selectively - got sent out was not really diplomatic, either, it sounds much like "thanks, bye!". Or was there any sort of emergency that made an immediate action indispensable? (A soon explanation by Gayle would certainly be helpful there.)
Th.
2013/5/12 Casey Brown lists@caseybrown.org
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:15 AM, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
This is the email that got sent out to everyone,
For what it's worth, this didn't get sent out to everyone. I was a bureaucrat and administrator, and have the most edits on that wiki (afaik?), and wasn't notified. Like Huib, I was also in the batch of blog moderator removals and wasn't notified about that either.
I'm not very active anymore, so it's not really a huge deal, but it's still bad form to have not gotten any kind of notification at all.
-- Casey Brown (Cbrown1023)
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Thomas Goldammer thogol@gmail.com wrote:
Wow, this was definitely a huge brick they dropped there... It seems, the WMF needs to hire someone (a diplomat) to counsel them about actions towards the volunteers. (Seriously!)
Or was there
any sort of emergency that made an immediate action indispensable? (A soon explanation by Gayle would certainly be helpful there.)
Th.
There was no emergency.
Yes, this.
I must admit, it's tremendously demotivating and makes me quite upset that people like Aphaia, Anthere, Danny B. and Thehelpfulone, people who have put hundreds if not thousands of hours of effort into this movement without asking for a single cent, over many many years, are treated as risks to be eliminated rather than assets to the movement whose input is to be treasured.
My main objection is not to the actual act of removing these rights (although as pointed out above by others, it seems to be a solution looking for a problem), my main objection is the remarkably callous and hamfisted way that it was executed. In particular, I think that making a potentially controversial change, and referring questions about that change to a staffer who is "heading out of town and will be unresponsive for a few days" is probably not good practice at all.
Does anyone from the Foundation honestly think this has been handled well? What lessons are there to be learned from this?
Cheers, Craig
On 12 May 2013 10:31, Thomas Goldammer thogol@gmail.com wrote:
Anyway, nothing would have been lost if Gayle had written to the folks a few weeks before the actual action was performed, informing that this is the plan and why. It's not necessary, WMF owns the page and can do just about everything there, but just for politeness it would have been nice. And yes, the email that - seemingly selectively - got sent out was not really diplomatic, either, it sounds much like "thanks, bye!". Or was there any sort of emergency that made an immediate action indispensable? (A soon explanation by Gayle would certainly be helpful there.)
Th.
It's also worth noting this wasn't a last minute decision at all; its foreshadowed in a number of comments by Philippe going back to seemingly mid-March, and there may be warnings of it earlier. So the WMF staff have been discussing this change internally for at least 6 weeks or so. That's a long time to not think up a better plan for rolling it out.
Well, perhaps there was extensive consultation from Phillippe and Gayle if it had been planned over a long period of time and I just missed it. If that's the case, I'm sure that one of them will point it out for us first thing on Monday morning, at which point I'd have to start removing egg from my face ;-)
Cheers, Craig
On 12 May 2013 14:15, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
It's also worth noting this wasn't a last minute decision at all; its foreshadowed in a number of comments by Philippe going back to seemingly mid-March, and there may be warnings of it earlier. So the WMF staff have been discussing this change internally for at least 6 weeks or so. That's a long time to not think up a better plan for rolling it out.
Craig Franklin wrote:
Well, perhaps there was extensive consultation from Philippe and Gayle if it had been planned over a long period of time and I just missed it. If that's the case, I'm sure that one of them will point it out for us first thing on Monday morning, at which point I'd have to start removing egg from my face ;-)
Philippe has had time to go back and remove Phoebe's user rights and Philippe has had time to post to this mailing list about the upcoming Wikimedia elections, but he has chosen not to participate in this thread at all about his actions.
MZMcBride
That is correct. Because despite your attempts to turn me into the decision making authority here, I wasn't. You don't need to talk to the worker bee who executed, you want to talk to the person who made the decision. That's not me. And she is traveling.
And also, you know, I'm working brutal hours right now and yeah, I wanted to try to not be posting this weekend. I had to deal with my mistake in not removing Phoebes rights at the same time and I had to deal with an elections thing. But was I anxious to come wading into a situation where - despite you clearly being told that I wasn't a decision maker - you continue to (for whatever reason) advance the asinine position that someone must be pulling gayles strings and therefore it must be me because I am evil? No, you know, MZ, I didn't come skipping gleefully to that conversation.
Let me be clear: I respect the work that you do. But I have zero time for your distortions of the situation when you've been told that it wasn't my decision.
You want an explanation? I'm sure that Gayle will offer one. But for the umpteenth time, I was the person pushing the button because someone had to be. So lets leave my motivations out of this okay? I'm spending hundreds of hours per month fighting to support the volunteer community here and your assignations to the contrary are insulting.
PB
————————— Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation, Inc
On May 12, 2013, at 10:06 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Philippe has had time to go back and remove Phoebe's user rights and Philippe has had time to post to this mailing list about the upcoming Wikimedia elections, but he has chosen not to participate in this thread at all about his actions.
Philippe Beaudette, 12/05/2013 22:23:
[...] You want an explanation? I'm sure that Gayle will offer one. But for the umpteenth time, I was the person pushing the button because someone had to be. So lets leave my motivations out of this okay? I'm spending hundreds of hours per month fighting to support the volunteer community here and your assignations to the contrary are insulting.
Philippe, you're right, but MZ is obviously too angry and personally involved right now to take his words too literally and personally against you. The most he could ask from you is a comment on how frequently you have to be the one "pushing the button" against the community. (Very often, is my guess.)
As for the decisions, it's clear that they come from the top and what they mean. Assuming that a board of trustees still exist (hey, did the bylaws amendment to keep you functioning have a weird effect and send you all to outer space?), they're maybe the ones who could have something more to say?
Nemo
On 05/12/2013 04:42 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
The most he could ask from you is a comment on how frequently you have to be the one "pushing the button" against the community.
Again with this meme!
"Against the community".
*NOBODY* works "against the community". Sometimes, we do things that displease part, or most of the community. Sometimes, there are mistakes, flubbed judgment calls, and boneheaded gaffes. By accident, confusion or miscommunication, the community might have been harmed. Occasionally, even, someone acts like a human and does something in anger or stupidity that was clearly wrong in retrospect.
But "Against the community" means seeing the community as an adversary, and acting to undermine or harm it. The very *attitude* necessary to say this is what causes those problems, trying to paint "Us vs. Them" on what should be collaboration.
If you think Philippe - or through him Gayle - did what they did "against the community", then you have already have abandoned any pretense of good faith towards the foundation and towards them personally. Unless you can back your assertions of malice, please take them elsewhere.
</rant>
-- Marc
Philippe Beaudette wrote:
You want an explanation? I'm sure that Gayle will offer one. But for the umpteenth time, I was the person pushing the button because someone had to be.
Why did you feel compelled to act here when it wasn't your decision? Was there something preventing Gayle from doing this herself?
It's pretty strange to involve yourself in this decision (that wasn't yours) and then turn around and say "well why are you pointing at me?!" You were raised in a wiki culture, just as I was, where an individual is responsible for the actions of his or her account. You obviously felt an obligation to act here. What remains unclear is why.
MZMcBride
MZMcBride, 12/05/2013 22:45:
Why did you feel compelled to act here when it wasn't your decision? Was there something preventing Gayle from doing this herself?
Be honest, if Gayle had done this herself you would have said that maybe she hadn't read the documentation on Special:UserRights carefully and it was a mistake. :)
It's pretty strange to involve yourself in this decision (that wasn't yours) and then turn around and say "well why are you pointing at me?!" You were raised in a wiki culture, just as I was, where an individual is responsible for the actions of his or her account. You obviously felt an obligation to act here. What remains unclear is why.
To me it's very clear, nobody wanted to take responsibility or blame for the decision(*) so they let someone who's going out of town take the blame, someone in another department press the button, and the top management cover everything with flimsy rhetoric. Next time they could do better, the act could be executed before a longer holiday or be spread across more departments (a third person to send the notification emails, or a deflag squad of 14 staffers as with fusillading). But no worries, the WMF is still a young org and is learning.
Nemo
(*) Which may have been discussed for several weeks, as Nathan pointed out.
On 5/12/13 10:45 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
Philippe Beaudette wrote:
You want an explanation? I'm sure that Gayle will offer one. But for the umpteenth time, I was the person pushing the button because someone had to be.
Why did you feel compelled to act here when it wasn't your decision? Was there something preventing Gayle from doing this herself?
It's pretty strange to involve yourself in this decision (that wasn't yours) and then turn around and say "well why are you pointing at me?!" You were raised in a wiki culture, just as I was, where an individual is responsible for the actions of his or her account. You obviously felt an obligation to act here. What remains unclear is why.
MZMcBride
Why = contractual agreement with his employer. He may have been "raised" in the wiki culture, he has obligations as staff.
Give Philippe a break MZMcBride. You are obviously unhappy and there are reasons for that; But giving Philippe the bad ride is not the way to go. Take a break, drink a tea, grab chocolate, watch a movie, have a walk. Anything. It is Sunday anyway.
Flo
Thanks for clarifying this Phillippe.
I must say that I think this discussion is becoming unpleasantly personal (and my initial email on the topic probably didn't help there, I concede). How about we stop pointing fingers at each other and conduct an honest and transparent appraisal of what has happened with a view to learning lessons from it so that it doesn't happen again. I also have to point out that while it's not ideal at all that this happened late on a Friday afternoon when everyone was leaving the office, nor is it reasonable to expect paid staff to snap to and respond on the weekends during their personal time. The damage has been done now, and it's not so urgent an issue that it can't wait until Monday for a response.
Cheers, Craig
On 13 May 2013 06:23, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org wrote:
That is correct. Because despite your attempts to turn me into the decision making authority here, I wasn't. You don't need to talk to the worker bee who executed, you want to talk to the person who made the decision. That's not me. And she is traveling.
And also, you know, I'm working brutal hours right now and yeah, I wanted to try to not be posting this weekend. I had to deal with my mistake in not removing Phoebes rights at the same time and I had to deal with an elections thing. But was I anxious to come wading into a situation where - despite you clearly being told that I wasn't a decision maker - you continue to (for whatever reason) advance the asinine position that someone must be pulling gayles strings and therefore it must be me because I am evil? No, you know, MZ, I didn't come skipping gleefully to that conversation.
Let me be clear: I respect the work that you do. But I have zero time for your distortions of the situation when you've been told that it wasn't my decision.
You want an explanation? I'm sure that Gayle will offer one. But for the umpteenth time, I was the person pushing the button because someone had to be. So lets leave my motivations out of this okay? I'm spending hundreds of hours per month fighting to support the volunteer community here and your assignations to the contrary are insulting.
PB
————————— Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation, Inc
On May 12, 2013, at 10:06 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Philippe has had time to go back and remove Phoebe's user rights and Philippe has had time to post to this mailing list about the upcoming Wikimedia elections, but he has chosen not to participate in this thread at all about his actions.
On 05/11/2013 06:26 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski wrote:
Let me repeat that: the WMF does not wish volunteers to help out with running their wiki, even if they have been helping out almost since the very start of the wiki.
Tomasz, while it seems clear that communications about that move seem to have been lacking, I think it's unwarranted to ascribe ill-intent to the WMF staff. Perhaps you should wait for a response from them before you declare what their wishes may be or what their reasons were?
-- Marc
Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
Tomasz, while it seems clear that communications about that move seem to have been lacking, I think it's unwarranted to ascribe ill-intent to the WMF staff. Perhaps you should wait for a response from them before you declare what their wishes may be or what their reasons were?
I cannot tell what was the /intent/ of the WMF when they acted (for obvious reasons), but I think that my description of the situation was pretty justified — and the message sent to all those desysopped volunteers could not have been more clear. If the WMF wants their help, why would they desysop them in the first place?
If you had read my e-mail, then I'm sure you noticed that I actually asked about the reasons for this decision and its execution, as I am unable to find any justification for what happened.
[Yes, I do understand there is a considerable time difference, etc; I'll be patiently waiting for a response from the WMF.]
-- Tomasz
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:32 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz@twkozlowski.net
wrote:
[Yes, I do understand there is a considerable time difference, etc; I'll be patiently waiting for a response from the WMF.]
Might even have to wait till Monday. This was done on a Friday night I think.
There doesn't seem to be any method to how these rights are being assigned and retained. Observations-
1) Only 2 of the current board members (besides Jimmy) have admin rights. Prob. on the argument that they are community-elected? 2) A few of the current admins that retained their flag have never made a contribution, or made any in the last year. 3) Phoebe for some reason, retains her right while currently not being on staff or the board. 4) Only 2 people are prob. assigned on the basis of "advisory board" without any explanation. There is no updated list to check who is on the advisory board this time.
There does seem to be a pattern about how this is being cleaned up, and I don't think Gayle is the impetus behind this though she is taking the blame for it.
Theo
Le Sat, 11 May 2013 17:50:18 +0200, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org a écrit:
Perhaps you should wait for a response from them before you declare what their wishes may be or what their reasons were?
At the same time, it’s a very bad timing of doing such a controversial action just before weekend, and let people wondering during two days the reasons behind this action. So waiting still 2 days..
Sébastien
On 05/11/2013 12:41 PM, Seb35 wrote:
At the same time, it’s a very bad timing of doing such a controversial action just before weekend, and let people wondering during two days the reasons behind this action. So waiting still 2 days..
Yes, IMO that was a faux-pas. This should have been announced in advance and not done late Friday, if only to avoid those open questions.
I note, however, that Sue gave an extended response in this thread a bit ago, so while it may not have been the best of timings, it's been swift. :-)
-- Marc
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz@twkozlowski.net
wrote:
These are questions directed at the WMF—for you regular folks, I have a riddle (I'll give a WikiLove barnstar to the first person to submit a correct answer). There is /at least/ one community member who does not hold any official position within the WMF, and who has not been desysopped in yesterday's purge—do you know who this person is?
If you're talking about me (I still seem to have admin rights, and no official position) I'll happily give up my admin flag -- not sure why I was left out of the batch. At any rate, I haven't edited much on the wmf wiki since last year; I just had admin rights so i could move files around when I was board secretary.
As for the whole thing -- it seems like especially poor timing and communication around the action. It also seems dumb to desysop some of the users who know the most about how to format and work with wikis. On the other hand, the WMF wiki is special -- as the home of material from the organization that basically does not get changed -- and I know there's been some incidents, as Sue refers to, of reversals of staff decisions that led to a lot of misunderstandings. I, and I suspect most of us, just take this in stride because it's happened to us dozens of times; newer staff may not, however.
Going forward I'd still support merging most of WMF wiki into meta, where we can use a normal community admin process; and keeping a limited version of it around for version-of-record documents and whatever technical needs re: fundraising it fills, and simply being a lot more clear about policies around that content.
-- phoebe
Tomasz W. Kozlowski wrote:
for those of you who do not watch the RecentChanges on the Foundation wiki https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges, I think it might be somehow surprising to see that in a top-level decision, almost all volunteer administrators of the wiki have been stripped off their adminship yesterday evening (UTC time).
Sigh.
It's been about six months since Philippe and Gayle orchestrated and executed this coup, removing every volunteer administrator without notice or justification.
Gayle hasn't made any mailing lists posts or edits to that wiki in the past few months. Philippe has made a handful of both. The wiki continues to clutter up with thousands of dead, or worse, misleading pages. There are even a couple still suggesting that donors send money to post office boxes in Florida....
I think it's difficult to assume good faith when you can see how interested Gayle or Philippe are in actually improving the wiki. Every indication so far says that their actions were a hit and run. :-/
I think it might be a reasonable goal for 2014 to do away with the wiki. Meta-Wiki will make a fine home.
MZMcBride
Hello MZM,
The wiki continues to clutter up
That's not quite apt. I see no backlog of requests for admin action, such as pages proposed for deletion. The number of admin actions of any sort has been low for years. The change in admins was a shift in policy, and resulted in some regular editors there leaving; but the real issues are that a) translation isn't well-integrated on that site, and b) most editors continue to be unable to edit at all, including talk pages, thanks to restrictive account-creation policies. These require dev, not admin, help to fix.
Migrating all but the essential pages to Meta is a worthy idea, one discussed for some time. Every editor on that wiki can work on that. Most of the links on the main page already point to other wikis and wikimedia sites. Regards, Sam.
Hi.
Samuel Klein wrote:
The wiki continues to clutter up
That's not quite apt. I see no backlog of requests for admin action, such as pages proposed for deletion.
With respect, the reality here is that there was a large ongoing cleanup effort that got sidetracked by this coup.
The opening post, which quoted Tomasz, linked to https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges, which currently reads:
Maintenance: Deletion requests (7) · Proposed deletions (1,163)
There'd be a lot more proposed deletions (probably somewhere around 10,000) if all the volunteers hadn't been put out.
Leaving incorrect donation information and broken donation forms on the site seems like a really bad idea. I think there's general agreement on this point. Plus most of the donation infrastructure is supposed to have moved to a separate wiki, as I understand it.
Migrating all but the essential pages to Meta is a worthy idea, one discussed for some time. Every editor on that wiki can work on that.
If we go in this direction, then we need to get serious about moving to Meta-Wiki and do it systematically. I think making it a 2014 goal is a reasonable timeframe.
MZMcBride
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Request_for_an_account_on_the_Foundation_wik... is quite backed up.
Rschen7754 rschen7754.wiki@gmail.com
On Nov 18, 2013, at 11:13 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
Samuel Klein wrote:
The wiki continues to clutter up
That's not quite apt. I see no backlog of requests for admin action, such as pages proposed for deletion.
With respect, the reality here is that there was a large ongoing cleanup effort that got sidetracked by this coup.
The opening post, which quoted Tomasz, linked to https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges, which currently reads:
Maintenance: Deletion requests (7) · Proposed deletions (1,163)
There'd be a lot more proposed deletions (probably somewhere around 10,000) if all the volunteers hadn't been put out.
Leaving incorrect donation information and broken donation forms on the site seems like a really bad idea. I think there's general agreement on this point. Plus most of the donation infrastructure is supposed to have moved to a separate wiki, as I understand it.
Migrating all but the essential pages to Meta is a worthy idea, one discussed for some time. Every editor on that wiki can work on that.
If we go in this direction, then we need to get serious about moving to Meta-Wiki and do it systematically. I think making it a 2014 goal is a reasonable timeframe.
MZMcBride
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MZMcBride, 19/11/2013 04:59:
I think it might be a reasonable goal for 2014 to do away with the wiki. Meta-Wiki will make a fine home.
+1. Nowadays, the most technical/scary HTML things are on donatewiki anyway, I guess. Even while the foundationwiki zombie is still around, Meta can immediately be used to improve content: 247 board resolutions have been copied to Meta and are translatable there, all the policies will join them soon.[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MessageGroupStats/agg-WMF_Resolutions
The 20+ private/restricted wikis[1] WMF has on its own are a serious liability: they are impossible to maintain, there is a reason if Nupedia's closed editing failed. ;-) WMF doesn't have capacity, so maybe – as suggested by Luis in a copyright-related discussion[2] – they could make some interns assess their content (what can become public, what needs to stay private to the same group of people, what can be shared on Internal) and then start consolidating stuff. Or even better, just merge them all to Internal, moving each to its own namespace with WMDE's Lockdown extension as interim solution; and move stuff there as needed.
Nemo
[0] If you can help with some copy and paste work, let us know at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta_talk:Babylon [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Private_wikis [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45767#c9
On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
maybe – as suggested by Luis in a copyright-related discussion[2] – they could make some interns assess their content (what can become public, what needs to stay private to the same group of people, what can be shared on Internal) and then start consolidating stuff. Or even better, just merge them all to Internal, moving each to its own namespace with WMDE's Lockdown extension as interim solution; and move stuff there
This would be a fine use for Internal. SJ
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