[Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>> and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on
>>> participation.
>> Please help me understand the implications of this statement.
>
> It simply means that
>
> a) we want to make sure that for the production roll-out, the user
> interface is not insane and appropriate to the specific en.wp
> configuration that's been proposed;

Aren't our volunteers qualified to contribute to this?

> b) we'll want to track participation metrics after the roll-out to see
> what the impact of this technology is.

I'm not sure what after the fact analysis has to do with the
deployment schedule.

> Accusations of "obstructionism" don't help; I understand where these
> come from, but it's a massive case of assume bad faith. Please stop
> it.

"Bad faith" — I don't think those words means what you think they mean.

I don't think anyone at the WMF is acting in bad faith.  Surely if you
intended to harm Wiki(p|m)edia you could come up with something better
than this.

My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly
overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki that
there simply hasn't been time to even make a simple configuration
change; ghat WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning
by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its
largest project, or that the WMF staff has decided that it knows
better than hundreds of contributors and that it needed to act
paternalistic and protect the community against its own decision by
ignoring it.  I am not the only person to harbor these concerns, for
example see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions&diff=316628512&oldid=316625478
.

All off of these can be supported by the facts in front of me; None of
them reflect very positively on Wikimedia's staff, but neither require
even an ounce of bad faith.

If "assume good faith" has become a code-word for "pretend everything
is done perfectly; ignore problems; provide no criticism" then it's an
aspect of our culture that needs to be eliminated.

I felt the latter hypothesis was supported by your statement that
"we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on
participation".   Even with your clarification I can't help but
understand that when I ask 'Why is FOO being delayed'  and you respond
(in part) 'Because we are concerned that it will harm things'  that
you aren't saying that you're intending to obstruct the deployment...

Extracting the purest (strawman?) form of statement: "It has not been
done yet, in part, because we think what the community decided may
harm participation. However, we aren't working with the community to
ameliorate this harm" is pretty much the definition of obstruction.

This is precisely the thing I was talking about when I said that I'm
concerned that Wikimedia is treating the contributors as 'users'
rather than partners:  If there are concerns about negative
side-effects of an initiative with a partner, you talk them out and
find solutions,  you don't drag your feet on implementing and hope the
demand goes away— though some organizations find that to be an
acceptable approach to handling needy customers.


If Wikimedia were more communicative about limitations and timelines
and more responsive to requests there wouldn't be as much need or room
to speculate.