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

[Brian]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Jennifer Riggs <jriggs at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> I'm curious. In your perspective who is doing the central management
> that makes it difficult for ideas to percolate up? WMF, Jimmy, Board,
> select administrators/highly involved community members? In your
> opinion, is there an infrastructure barrier or a personalities one?
>
> jriggs
>

It's an infrastructure, policy and outreach issue. I assume that every
single person has the very best for the projects in mind and is doing it for
the right reasons.

That said, I see the definition of community being interpreted very
narrowly. I liked what I saw with AbuseFilter but that was a singular case.
Filtering edits is almost on the same level as showing advertisements. In
these rare cases any change you try to make will quickly make its way
through the community because many people will be outraged. There are a lot
of other situations that don't propagate as well, not because they aren't
very important, but because people just don't know about them.

I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any
discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a
major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are
stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to come
here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that agreement
happened.