Which gulf is growing more quickly - between the WMF staff and volunteers, or between the veteran editing population and the typical reader? I won't argue that there is some distance, and a degree of conflict, between the goals and priorities of the staff and many veteran volunteers. But this distance hasn't occurred organically. It's been introduced consciously, and mentioned on a number of occasions, by WMF leaders like Sue and Erik. They have often made the point that the WMF has to consider first the hundreds of millions of readers who compose our intended audience.
No one has said, that I've seen, that complaints and problems from the editing community should be ignored. But I think Steve and Jon are struggling with how to react to complaints without knowing how representative they are of the reader experience. If complaints are presented by a tiny percentage of the editing community, how many should they assume are encountering the problem but not reporting it? If readership numbers don't change, and people who login to complain are definitionally lumped into "editors", how do we assess the impact on readers and whether or not many readers are having difficulty?
These aren't easy questions to answer. Many people complaining about this change, and others, seem to make different automatic assumptions about relevance and impact than the WMF staff, or they don't consider it at all. To be fair to the engineering staff, we should keep in mind that they have to relate complaints from developers and editors to the experience of hundreds of millions of readers and make decisions principally (but not wholly) based on the latter, not the former. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
To be honest, I'm kind of tired of hearing, "won't anyone think of the readers" as an excuse to do pretty much anything. Most of the time (not all the time) I've seen that excuse be used, there isn't any evidence about how the change actually affects the readers except for the authors' own conjecture (Or if they do have evidence, they largely aren't communicating it very well). Readers generally don't complain when something changes for the worse, unless it really changes for the worse (e.g. Site going down). Even if the readers did complain in the same way our users do, taking a lack of complaints to mean something is a positive improvement, seems like a recipe for confirmation bias.
That said, we shouldn't be afraid of making changes where we reasonably think they might be a good idea, even without evidence they actually are. You can't have data on everything. I just don't like "Well we are undoubtedly making things better for the reader" used as a counter argument to criticism when we simply don't know what it will do for the average reader.
--bawolff