[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2010/6/6 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com>:
> On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> There is a clear attitude from the foundation staff that I, and
>> others, are perceiving in these discussions.  The notion that the
>> community of contributors is a particularly whiny batch of customers
>> who must be 'managed', that they express demands unconnected from the
>> needs of the readers... and that it is more meaningful when a couple
>> of office staff retreat to some meeting room and say "we reached a
>> decision".
>
> I agree entirely with this, and most of the rest of your post.
> Wikimedia has not yet figured out how to manage paid employees
> alongside a community.  I've been meaning to write up some comments on
> this, and hopefully will get to that soonish.  If important volunteer
> contributors raise complaints about a change, it's not acceptable to
> simply say "This is what we've decided".  You need to seriously engage
> their arguments in detail, and provide the data used to make the
> decision.  Yes, this costs employees time that they could be using to
> work on other things, but a strong community will repay the time
> invested tenfold.

I meant to write something about this, too, but i feared that i would
sound rude and touch sensitive issues :)

So yes, it's a major organizational problem. This affair should be
remembered in the future when such significant technical decisions are
made.

> Separately, I think that many (not all) of the people objecting to the
> change in this case presented weak arguments, as I detailed in
> previous posts.  But this does not mean that they should be ignored,
> only refuted.  (And *some* of the arguments against the change were
> not obviously incorrect.)

... And you made very interesting and challenging counterarguments indeed.

I think that most of us can agree now that the decision to make the
change was made by a small number of people and based on assumptions
which were not necessarily wrong, but the discussion about and the
testing of which was minimal.

The Interlanguage links feature is not much smaller than Flagged
Revisions, which is being thoroughly tested and discussed for many
months now.

-- 
אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
Amir Elisha Aharoni

http://aharoni.wordpress.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore