Austin Hair wrote: Internal-l is pretty active, with 5 posts in the same period, and there's been a few topics on wikien-l in the last few days which might have been posted here instead if they came up a week ago. I think we're seeing more of a choice of forum than respect for the moderators. -- Tim Starling

Hoi, At the time when the internal forums were created, the fear was expressed that people would more and more make use of them. Effectively making the WMF an organisation shrouded in secrecy. Foundation-l is still the list best used for people who have something that is not secret. This list will function properly again once people start posting stuff that does not need to be secret and therefore do not need to be on one of the internal lists. Thanks, GerardM 2009/11/17 Austin Hair <adhair(a)gmail.com>

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yeah, I don't see that anything has changed. This list has always has periods of low activity and periods of very high activity. The latter might be going away, but it's too soon to tell.

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Dennis During <dcduring(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think you're right, particularly given that foundation-l was closed for nearly a week. Participants have been posting to other lists, or keeping discussion on Meta or Wikipedia instead. That said, I would hope that no one is "scared" of posting here, and if you are, I hope you'll contact either myself or Austin and tell us why. -- [[User:Ral315]]

2009/11/17 Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315(a)gmail.com> That said, I would hope that no one is "scared" of posting here, and if you I hope so too, but I would understand why they wouldn't say so. People might be nervous, scared or simply confused - in which cases they'd be less likely to speak up than if they were angry. Fact of (online?) life, folks! Therefore, this might be a good time to clarify what this list is for, and what kinds of things are not considered appropriate or productive. Currently, we have a single sentence on [[m:Mailing list]] [1] about maintaining wikiquette and avoiding personal attacks - and nothing on the foundation-l info page [2]. This could be essentially refactoring what's on the Improving foundation-l page [3]; but in any case, guidelines should be explicit somewhere to both discourage what we don't want, and to encourage what we do - thereby hopefully reassuring people that we *do* value diverse input. Cormac [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_list [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l