On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:05 AM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
There is a bit of amnesia about the fact that almost all editors are also
readers and regular users of the projects we create, and those editors have
been encouraged since Day One to inform developers of any technical
problems with the site; they're the canaries in the coal mine. And for
anyone who's been editing more than 3-4 years (an ever-increasing
percentage of the editing community), "software" issues were things they
had to pretty much solve themselves within the volunteer community. For
years, most developers were volunteers too, and had close links to the
editing community. At least a good portion of you remember those days -
because you used to be those volunteer developers that community members
would hit up to fix things, and you used to watch the village pumps to
figure out what else needed to be fixed. Until very recently, it was almost
unheard-of for community members to be told that problematic things were
going to stay that way because of a decision made by a small number of
people in an office somewhere. When most developers were clearly
participating as community members, they behaved as though they were, at
least to a significant extent, accountable to both the editing and
Mediawiki communities; I'm not sure that sense of accountability exists
anymore. Now, I don't think anyone begrudges the many talented developers
who started off within the community having taken the opportunity to move
on to paid positions at the WMF, and I think on the whole the big-picture
community is overall very happy with the majority of changes that have come
with the increased professionalization of the site engineering and
operations. But this is a major change in culture, and the gulf between
volunteers (either developer or editor) and WMF staff is widening
noticeably as time progresses. I could tell who was a volunteer and who
was staff from the way their posts were responded to in this thread; I
doubt that would have been the case even two years ago.
<snip>
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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.