Changing project tags would have been a much better idea, and how
every other backlog-focused team deals with similar situations. Even
triaging as Lowest would have been better. Closing as Declined says
that the task can't be completed by anyone, at any time.
The choice to (improperly) decline a bunch of valid tasks is one
thing, but doing it as a silent batch edit is another thing entirely.
As I mentioned in
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wcpss4hjs4552ak6, using a silent
edit to make controversial actions has the appearance of an evasion of
scrutiny. Even if the decision to use a silent batch edit was made in
good faith (and I have no reason to think it wasn't), it still meant
that the action was not properly communicated to those involved and is
difficult for others to review. The only place the action was logged
was on the tasks themselves, where it would only be seen by someone
who happened to come across it. This goes against the idea that
actions and decisions should be public and open for review if at all
possible found both in Phabricator etiquette and the Wikimedia
movement more generally.
Silent batch edits are an extremely powerful tool, which is why only a
few people have the ability to mark a batch edit as silent. However,
the use of this ability does not appear to be routinely logged
publicly, in Phabricator or externally
<https://sal.toolforge.org/__all__?p=0&q=%22make-silent%22&d=>, which
is unusual when compared to similar actions elsewhere. There is also
no written documentation about when batch edits can be made silent,
which sets up the potential for differing expectations like this.
ACN
On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:07 PM Bartosz Dziewoński <matma.rex(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For tasks where you do not have the capacity to work on them, but which
> are not declined, can you instead re-open them and only remove the
> Readers-Web-Backlog project?
>
>
> --
> Bartosz Dziewoński
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