[WikiEN-l] Improving dialogue between editors and "tech people"

[Charles Matthews]

On 25 October 2012 14:07, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:

> As you'll probably agree, communication between Wikipedia contributors
> and "tech people" (primarily MediaWiki developers, but also designers
> and other engineers) hasn't always been ideal. In recent years,

>From the community's side, awareness of issues is good, but is not
always matched by the framing and articulation. Given that tech
requires spec - a good way to annoy a developer is waffling about what
is wrong rather than specifying a fix - the potential for mismatch in
communications is high.

Now I have thought for a little while now that "getting smarter all
round" is what we must do, rather than the traditional blame games. So
more meeting in the middle is what has to happen. One thing that could
be an improvement is more exposition from the tech side, less meeting
a request or query with a rhetorical question (which has happened to
me, even face-to-face).

Charles