[Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles

[Marcus Buck]

  An'n 26.08.2010 14:20, hett Gerard Meijssen schreven:
> Hoi,
> Other members of the LC can confirm to you that there is little need to
> discuss things on our list. Most mails are boringly business like.
If it's boring there is no reason to keep it secret. So no argument for 
your position.
> When you find the explanation provided not enough, then that is tough. At
> the time we were really happy to gain a new member with its qualifications.
> I am not willing to abandon people now for opportunistic reasons. We were
> really happy and fortunate deepening the experience of the LC as a group. As
> there was a requirement for confidentiality, it was and is in my opinion not
> fair to filter only one person out.
You try to make it appear like an attack on a single person. It's not 
about removing any person from the committee, we just want them to be 
transparent and stand to their words publicly. And it's also not a 
single person, it's you and one more committee member. I don't like 
speaking in mysteries. The second, so far unnamed member whose posts are 
secret is User:Karen. She seems to be solely active on the mailing list 
and has zero edits in the wiki. Some info about her is in the edit 
history of her user page on Meta. I have no specific reason to doubt 
that she is a competent contributor to the committee's discussions, but 
on the other hand there seems to be not a single word from her mouth 
publicly documented on the committee's home wiki Meta and not a single 
bit of information available about her qualifications or the reasons and 
circumstances she became a member of the committee.

I have no idea why you put the word 'opportunistic' in your comment. 
According to Wikipedia "opportunism" is:
"[..] the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of 
circumstances, with little regard for principles."

"Making decisions that affect the public (like the creation of new 
Wikimedia projects) public and transparent" is a principle (a very 
important principle). That's the exact opposite of opportunism.
> The added benefit of confidentiality is that we are more free to discuss
> things. It limits the amount of double talk a lot.  As a consequence there
> is hardly any pre-cooking of mails going on.
Any decision of the committee should be based on facts and the language 
proposal policy defines which facts are to be considered. So if you 
abstain from personal judgements in your decisions there is just no 
reason that could cause external criticism. And if it should be the case 
that you and Karen make statements in the discussions (the others do 
not, as I can check in the archives) that would make mandatory the 
application of double talk to be acceptable when uttered in public, I'd 
find that worrying.
> The language committee is not
> the only confidential list. Its remit is extremely limited. Compare that
> with the internal, the chapter, the cultural list who are confidential often
> for reasons that are as appropriate.
What has a limited remit to do with transparency? The things you do in 
your limited remit are extremely relevant to some groups. Our mailing 
lists should be public whenever possible so people have the chance to 
object to wrong or bad decisions, to give additional input, to 
understand decisions etc. That's the basic idea behind transparency. 
Internal-l was created as an internal counterpart to foundation-l on 
purpose for discussions that cannot be done in public (e.g. for legal 
reasons). I hope and assume internal-l sticks to this purpose and all 
topics that don't require privacy are discussed on public lists. I don't 
know the reasons why the chapter and cultural lists are internal, I have 
not even ever heard about cultural list (what is it?), I assume there is 
a reason. If there is no specific reason they should be open and 
transparent.

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox