On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
This is the exact kind of attitude the op-ed in the Signpost is addressing. When making major feature decision, such as redoing the entire templating system, we cannot just say to editors "oh, if you want some input, go and join our mailing list". That's just a passive-aggressive way of pushing editors out of the conversation. How many purely editors, i.e., not developers, are on this list actively participating in discussion?
Which communities? Engaging N editing communities just doesn't scale. Nor, to be perfectly honest, do I think its the appropriate venue. I expect people to join the places technical discussions take place (this list + mediawiki.org), just as I expect I should have to join a wiki's discussion forums to discuss content/community things. I'm perfectly willing to engage anyone on anything I work on, but I don't want to repeat myself in 20 different places.
A long time ago, technical discussions happened on Meta. It was moved off of Meta since there's enough content to warrant its own wiki. Perhaps we can improve on getting notices out to people (hey, we're discussing FooBar, come talk with us [here]), but trying to shift the discussion to hundreds of individual wikis just doesn't work for me.
-Chad