Hey folks,
I usually steer clear of these sort of battles, but it looks like it's time to state the obvious: *we need to work together better*.
We're wiki people, damn it. We're the people[1] who figured out how to build an encyclopedia through (effectively) an anonymous system when those with less imagination were skeptical what it could even work at all. Now, we're fighting against ourselves about technology to support our wiki work and it is only wasting time, energy and social capitol.
DaB, I don't follow toolserver-l as well as I should. What can I do to help make sure that the Toolserver cluster is well supplied *at least* until labs meets 99.9% of tool developers needs. Do I need to lobby the WMF? WMDE?
Ryan, I'm sure it was not out of some sort of malicious intent, but a large number of toolserver users and especially DaB are getting a raw deal. At some point, someone seems to have suggested that WMF Labs ought to replace the Toolserver. This is painful because, while Labs is not yet ready for us, the Toolserver is already being phased out. It's not fair to just say, "Come on over to Labs and help us." I don't see how jumping ship before the next one shows up is a good idea. The majority of us are doing our work as volunteers. We can't just manifest extra maintainer hours in order to spend developer time on Labs. We're already spending more time dealing with Toolserver issues than we normally would.
Finally, the Toolserver isn't just a resource. It's our community. A community is far more valuable than technology. If we don't preserve our community, we'll all lose. So please, when we're fighting each other, our first thought should be how to not need to fight anymore.
So here we are. Today was wasted arguing about who was wronged. How do we work together better tomorrow?
-Aaron
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 9:05 AM, DaB. WP@daniel.baur4.info wrote:
Hello, At Thursday 02 May 2013 15:29:07 DaB. wrote:
I'm confused. I thought we were all here to support the readers, editors, researchers and developers of the Wikimedia projects? If the toolserver
is
empty because Labs is accomplishing the goal, isn't that a good thing?
I've asked this before: why not help with Labs, rather than fighting everyone? Let's work as a team
do not forget who started the fighting: The WMF. The WMF announced to WMDE that the database-replication is going to end in the near future, what caused that WMDE stopped to support the Toolserver properly. The very goal with this was to let (Tool-)Labs be the only alternative. A fair approach would have been to create Labs as an alternative to the Toolserver, letting the users (new and old) decide which system they want to use. Toolserver and Labs could have existed in coexistence, exchanging knowledge, and maybe specially in different fields after a while. But that was not what happened. Instead the WMF decided because the are bigger, have more money, servers and personal, and control the replication-data, that they just could put the toolserver to an end – what didn't work as well as expected. And now we are sitting here with confused tool-authors, annoyed tool-users and a angry root. I didn't start the fight and I am not interested in teaming-up with a party which was not interested to build a team in the very beginning when it counted. Switching or helping with Labs would signal that I'm fine with all what the WMF did – and I'm not.
Sincerely, DaB.
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