On 2 September 2015 at 14:17, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
For what it's worth, the line " For one thing, they can turn out negative, in which case we will have been spared a philosophical debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the wrong approach.
Debates about the Wikimedia ethos tend to be highly subjective and thus costly both in terms of time and emotional resources. Measuring whether banners work is fairly simple and objective. It makes sense to perform the cheapest prerequisite checks first, to minimize total cost.
And without any answer to my question about whether this was an actual A/B test, and whether you're measuring overall user utility rather than 'did they download it', this is also highly subjective and costly both in terms of time and emotional resources.
But you're missing...well, two important points. First, as Brandon says, these debates /have to happen/. Identifying that something is a *right* thing to do, an *ethical* thing to do, cannot happen after that thing has been done. And second: costly in terms of time? Costly in terms of emotional resources? This thread is costly on both, and it is also an inevitable consequence of not having the discussion in advance.
Yes, having discussions takes time and energy. And sometimes you don't like the outcome. Those are a given outcome of talking to people. But they are things we do /regardless/ of whether we feel like not talking to people would be easier (not talking to people is always easier) and they are things that, nine times out of ten, are actually a massive saving on time and emotional energy. Because it means you can have conversations with people exploring the ethical costs and benefits of doing an action, and then do (or not do) that action, rather than do that action and then deal with /outraged/ people who are approaching the situation not as a hypothetical but as something that actually happened.
And it's apparent, from the replies to this thread, that this decision did not save on emotional energy - it just offloaded it. We have multiple staffers and volunteers sat here sending messages that boil down to "this does not represent me. This is not the movement I work towards". That's not a tremendously pleasant experience for us. We have an expectation on us, as human beings and movement members and staffers, that we will consider the /systemic/ impact of what we choose to do and not do. Describing talking about it in advance as too much of an emotional load makes it appear that that evaluation was not adequately performed.
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