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

[Benjamin Lees]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> Sorry, where I said AbuseFilter I meant to say FlaggedRevisions. I'm not
> sure on how AbuseFilter came to be agreed on.
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
>
> > 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.
> >
> >
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On which wiki do you mean, for FlaggedRevs?  For the English Wikipedia, my
understanding is that consensus was reached in favor of a limited trial for
FlaggedRevs three months ago, but it hasn't been enabled yet because the
tech team is still tidying things up and checking that everything works <
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-May/043187.html>. This
was not a matter of the Foundation consulting the community—the community
petitioned the Foundation, from what I can tell.

I realize that 324 people voting might not qualify as "the community" for
you, but this is the way changes get made on the English Wikipedia: people
debate for a while (an extremely long while, as the case may be), proposals
get tossed around, and eventually consensus forms among the portion of
editors that is active in policy discussions.  This system is not ideal, but
it's the system that's in place.
If you want to call the validity of the English Wikipedia's decision-making
processes into question, then do so, but I don't think you should frame the
discussion as being about the Foundation or software changes.