Getting the dreaded community consensus for useful features and fixes is indeed a painful experience and i'm not joking. One way to counter it is to present the communities with results of research that has been conducted and shown that these features actually achieve something positive. Was such research conducted about WikiLove? 2011/10/29 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>om>:

Hoi, I am happy to make a distinction of what I do officially and what I say because I am personally of a particular opinion. This is very much my personal opinion. There have been LOADS of opportunities where the community is asked, begged to be involved in what will be the way forward. The most obvious opportunity has been the Strategy project. At this time the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for all sorts of volunteers that are asked to help determine what future functionality will be like. Specifically I want to mention the need for "language support teams" and volunteers for our mobile development. The position of the WMF as I know it is that it wants very much an involved community. To be effective, it is important for the community to be involved early in the process. Sadly many people want to be only involved at the end of the process. This does not help much and particularly not on issues that are not the bread and butter of working on content by the existing community. I made points in my previous mail. They have not been addressed. We agree on the need for community involvement. The WMF has a strong tradition on involving its communities. My argument is that the programs that are discussed are very much monitored for their effect, based on the results the functionality will be tweaked. My argument is that these programs are the result of community consultation and therefore community involvement is the origin of the functionality we are discussing. Thanks, GerardM On 29 October 2011 16:56, Fae <fae(a)wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

So... Wikilove is enabled on all Wikis only by consensus... except en.wp, where it was pushed out with no consensus and as far as I can tell, no research yet proving it had any results? 2011/10/29 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>

On 10/29/11 8:36 PM, Jorgenev wrote: One take away from this experience of yours could be that the process of utilizing talk pages is extremely arcane and horrible from a user experience perspective, while using WikiLove to communicate - even though it is the "wrong" channel - is far easier and preferable to new users. -- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

Would it be then logical to hang a proper communication tool which eventually would land the user on the talk page where Wikilove now hangs? Cheers Yaroslav

On 30 October 2011 17:44, Brandon Harris <bharris(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Perhaps we should apply the Common Name policy to the interface as well as article titles.

On 30 October 2011 16:44, Brandon Harris <bharris(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: +1 - this one got me attempting to explain stuff to someone on the phone last week. I suspect our main newbie problem is Wikipedia's utter opacity. Outsiders have *no goddamn clue* how this thing is even supposed to wo - d.

I see Brandon replied to this thread several times; did anyone notice if the question in the OP (if community consensus is required for implementation, where was it demonstrated for en.wp) was answered?

Agree with Erik at his last e-mail. To me is a nice way to get consensus about this issue. _____________________ MateusNobre MetalBrasil on Wikimedia projects (+55) 85 88393509 30440865

But if we enable it at a wiki that doesn't want it, there could be a boycott, and vandals just get the place up to there "code". It would be very detrimental to wikipedia. On 11-10-29 12:27 PM, "Nickanc Wikipedia" <nickanc.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

It could happen. On 11-10-29 4:57 PM, "Mateus Nobre" <mateus.nobre(a)live.co.uk> wrote:

* Mateus Nobre wrote: If you create a new account and edit a bit, on some projects odds are some other editor will place on your Talk page some template saying they saw you editing and wanted to personally welcome you. Some might find that nice, others might feel they are being stalked because someone is monitoring them, ridiculed as there is nothing personal about placing templates, most probably with a single click, on talk pages, and exposed as the first thing anyone visiting the talk page would see is that they are a newbie. Some may think of http://www.despair.com/motivation.html when they find themself as recepient of this kind of Wikilove. And they would have a hard time showing their discomfort because society expects you to appreciate when someone appears to try to be nice to you, which would add to their discomfort. Some editors just want to edit articles and regard the "social" and "meta" dimensions of the project as annoying distractions, while other editors see those as the main attractions. Some prefer "You are nice.", others are far more motivated hearing "You did a good job." Some might be thrilled if they see someone clicked them a kitty, others might find it far more meaningful if another editor takes the time to manually go to their talk page and manually write, say, "I signed in this morning and saw you added a great picture to the article I created yesterday. That made me smile, thank you." without hearts and beers and single clicks (similarily, adding the picture might be a far better show of appreciation than a clicked kitty with thanks for the new article.) It's hard to smile online. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Mateus Nobre <mateus.nobre(a)live.co.uk> wrote: What a lot of people would reply is: "Because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" A little story: on the Italian Wikipedia we were calling WikiLove a call to calm down when discussions are getting too hot, and one day one Italian newspaper wrote an article about WikiLove (the new MediaWiki feature) and we were wondering what the hell they were talking about. Because we couldn't believe that such a feature could exist. I then realised that it was active on commons, and it looks like some of the things you could get on facebook three years ago, which look so old now. I don't like it, and I'm not going to use it even if it was implemented on my home wiki. But I'm sure some people would use it, and I prefer they use it rather than vandalizing pages. Cruccone

On 30 October 2011 10:15, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru> wrote: And in practice, a lot of new users think the templates are actually placed by bots. A sort of Turing test in reverse. - d.