[Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27

[Nathan]

Hi Michael,

If the community decides it doesn't want to use Pending Changes, but
the feature remains enabled, it will be a constant battle to police
usage of the extension. Why should the extension remain enabled on the
project if its community decides not to use it? That frankly makes no
sense at all. I understand the argument that the community can just
decide not to use it and punish people for doing it anyway, but that
seems like a pretty silly way of going about things.

If the trial said the extension would be turned off, and it didn't get
turned off, then whatever the reason... Someone from the WMF, who is
making the decisions here about enabled vs. disabled, should
acknowledge that the rules changed and that concerns and irritation as
a result are valid. Waving it off by pointing to polls that clearly
don't establish the Wikipedia norm for consensus? Not a great idea, in
terms of internal PR. Start by apologizing for setting false
expectations, and move on from there.

As to participation - the PC polls got as much participation as any
poll of any type ever has on Wikipedia. I suppose you can set the bar
higher, and say this particular poll is so important it should get ten
times as many voters as a normal poll, but... I'm afraid the number of
people involved in Wikipedia =/= the number of people interested in
the meta management, and it seems like the polls got a pretty
representative sample of the second group.

Finally, the folks objecting to discussing en.wp should think about
how it feels to people who edit en.wp when, every time it comes up on
Foundation-l, old hands on the list say to take it somewhere else. The
list is by no means dominated by en.wp issues, and I think most
reasonable people will agree that en.wp is by far the highest profile
project and chiefly responsible for putting the Wikimedia movement on
the map. The most major problems facing the English Wikipedia are
challenges for the Foundation as a whole, and there should be a place
for those problems on foundation-l.

Nathan