Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
Almost every WMF developer attended Wikimania this year, and there was quite a lot of fruitful discussion and feedback given. Somewhat surprisingly (to me, it was my first Wikimania) the tone in person was quite different than what you might expect from email list traffic.
Perhaps
that was self-selection, as the attendees at Wikimedia were the members
of
the community interested in constructively working on solutions.
[...]
{{cn}}
I dont know which part you want cited... but i can also confirm that ancedotally people at wikimania were much more positive about certain feature developments than the general attitude online.
The last subordinate clause. I highly doubt that all "mem- bers of the community interested in constructively working on solutions" were at Wikimania, leaving none elsewhere, and that all Wikimania attendees are "interested in construc- tively working on solutions" given that at least some were there at their employer's direction.
What to make of this(whether its selection bias, or if online attitudes reflect just a vocal minority, or if people in real life are just more shy and dont want to get in a real world fight so they tell us what we think we want to hear, or if something else is the case. I dont know. All i know is it was surprising)
[...]
As I wrote in http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/753...:
| [...]
| +1. In a physical meeting, there is higher bandwith, but a | lot of the payload can be pity, intimidation, "nobody leaves | before we have an agreement", etc.
Additionally, at a venue like Wikimania, most of the atten- dees are not there to "work", but take it as some form of "vacation", so there isn't much incentive to take a stand about something like Media Viewer, especially as in the end it is not up for discussion anyhow, so why bother?
Tim