[Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?

[Brian]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 8:32 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia-inc.com> wrote:

>   I'd be interested to see your positive, assume-good-faith list of
> suggestions.
>

One of my favorite suggestions, from Erik, is that we use IdeaTorrent (
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ ) in order to provide a single place for users
to engage in very important discussions about all manner of issues relating
to the community. Right now there is simply no way for our widely disparate
community of users, who have expertise in every area imaginable and whose
collective input is extremely valuable, to come together and have a
conversation. It takes someone such as yourself to champion an idea to the
community and present it in its best form and make sure that the best of the
arguments from both sides are heard from users.

As the projects have grown and as they have become more centrally managed in
a top down fashion it has become increasingly difficult for ideas to
percolate from the bottom up. How can a user with a great idea on one wiki
present it and be sure that users from the other wikis and the WMF see it?
Likewise, how can the Foundation ask questions of the *entire* community?
Neither users or the Foundation have a voice that can reach everyone
(fundraising and the like are an exception). There isn't a plausible conduit
through which we can present and receive ideas and those ideas are
considered on an equal basis with all other ideas and then refined and
improved by the will of the community and ultimately implemented (by a
volunteer or the WMF).

Regarding the software, I think it's great to hold a conversation on
wikitech-l about the best way to replace ParserFunctions. Of course, the way
we got ParserFunctions was through a conversation on wikitech-l which
entertained a few ideas but ultimately did not have the wider goals of the
community in mind due to the narrow scope of the discussions. Usability and
encyclopedia writing were not concerns, CPU cycles was. The justification
was, and continues to be, well, there is obviously a problem here. Therefore
we, the code writers, have free license to develop a new solution, ask our
friends in IRC if it looks nice, and then put it on the live sites. It's not
even clear how you could extract a consensus from wikitech-l if it were
there.

If you take fully consulting the community consensus seriously then there is
a very different design model that then leads to development. In this method
we have a plausible way of asking a large number of *editors and users* what
is wrong with the software. You have to get many of the people who actually
edit the encyclopedia a lot and have something to say about what's wrong
with it and what's right with it in the same place fully engaged with each
other. Right now we do not have tools that facilitate this. Article talk
pages are simply not it. Meta is not it - the people aren't there. The
mailing lists aren't it - the people aren't here. We represent a tiny
minority of the community and a minority of the total number of people who
would, if they were afforded the opportunity, have an opinion worth hearing.
If you look at the number of people engaged in any conversation which will
have a serious impact on all of the projects and then compare that number to
any measure of active editors and contributors you will see that it is
shockingly small. I encourage the WMF to make that ratio as large as
possible, and I suggest that the larger you make it the more we will all
benefit.

I get the feeling that many people look at full consultation as a lot of
really hard work. I think that's wrong - we are supposed to be leveraging
the power of communities. The WMF has the power to enable a community to
come together and form a consensus by bringing their attention all to the
same place. I think that until something like that happens full consultation
is more of a dream that many people aren't even trying to realize and
changes will continue to be made to the software and otherwise which aren't
really in the right direction. For example, it's not clear to everyone that
Wikipedia even needs a programming language. I don't know if it does or not.
There are a lot of things to take into consideration, such as usability,
readability of the main article namespace, duplication of content, ease of
more sophisticated editing, and issues you or I might not even think of!
Adding a programming language is not a magic bullet to these issues. It
could in fact be that templates and the way we work with article content in
the first place needs to be entirely rethought. This is not a conversation
that should be limited to wikitech-l. In fact, editors might have a more
useful opinion. But in the current system their opinions won't be sought out
as the decision to do it was entirely top down.

Lastly, I do not consider a wide distaste for the look of ParserFunctions to
be a sanction for a new programming language. ParserFunctions was added
because a few users decided to abuse templates in order to get if-like
functionality, but it was not done in consultation with the community. Thus,
at the very least, I suggest we go back to the community and ask them, from
the perspective of just having vanilla templates, how we can improve the
software to make Wikipedia and the other projects better. And I suggest that
we solicit feedback from as many people as we possibly can - fully consult
the community consensus!