[Foundation-l] #wikipedia

[Rory Stolzenberg]

On 6/20/07, Dejan Čabrilo <dcabrilo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2) Whom can we ask for help? Most of the people in #wikipedia dislike
> both the new rules and how they were implemented and we don't want seanw
> in charge. As demonstrated in the channel and on the talk page of the
> Guideline.


Make specific proposals for changing the guideline on the talk page and here
on the mailing list. Simply making a lot of noise about how much the
guidelines suck and how seanw should lose his group contact privileges
aren't going to get you anywhere. Participating in productive discussion
will.

3) Who are seanw and other people who authorized them to come up with
> rules? Can I make a gudeline on wikimedia and say that I'm in charge of
> the feud I choose? Please :P


Seanw was a group contact of Wikimedia, appointed by the foundation to be a
liaison between WMF and Freenode, and also to be in charge of the channels.
Mark_Ryan had the access level to appoint ops before the change, and was
generally the most active of the people with the same access level.
Dmcdevit, AFAICT, didn't actually do any of the organizing of the change,
but (I think) he previously had the access to add/remove ops and so Mark and
Sean made him Mark's deputy in enforcing the new guidelines and promoting
new ops.


> 4) Why was there no community input? You can say all you want, but I
> first heard about the issues on this mailing list from /topic, and first
> saw the guideline after it was enforced.


There was no community input because nobody read the places where they
called for it. I'll admit that I think that Sean and Mark could have been a
bit more proactive in finding people to comment, but, because the guidelines
being passed doesn't mean that people can't still discuss it and change it,
it wasn't a huge mistake, people are just making it so because they're
constantly whining about how much they hate the guidelines instead of
working to revise them to make them better.

5) Is this how we are going to go about other issues on Wikipedia, too?

Dejan Čabrilo
>
> Someone being bold and then everyone discussing their changes is how we've
made decisions on Wikipedia for a long time.

Rory