[Foundation-l] Foundation too passive, wasting community talent

[MZMcBride]

Jan Kucera (Kozuch) wrote:
> why is the Foundation so passive??? I have been since almost 5 years with
> various Wikimedia projects and I can really see NO PROGRESS from the side of
> the Foundation but more employees, 2 new blogs, new Vector skin and maybe
> MediaWiki performance tweaks. My participation declined radically, because I
> can not feel any real support from the foundation. It is not 2006 anymore.
> Look at what other websites have done in 5 years and you realize they have
> undergone major redesigns. And as someone wrote here lately Wikipedia still
> seems so 2005. This is OK for an encyclopedia, but unfortunately the way
> volunteers work is stuck in 2005 too...

It's a volunteer community: you can improve the sites at will. I agree that
a lot of the software development in the past year or two has been rather
boring. MediaWiki 1.17 was largely a lot of "fixes under the hood" and it
took way too long to go live. On the Wikimedia side of things, it's been
roughly the same: new datacenter, better ops support, etc. This isn't
exciting work, but it does hopefully make it more likely that, going
forward, other people can spend their time focusing on software feature
development and code review rather than constantly battling to keep the site
up. Or something like that.

A lot of the projects that Wikimedia is investing in today are small and
focused on particular needs of the Wikimedia Foundation, not the Wikimedia
community. One example might be an article feedback tool that's largely
focused on ensuring that Wikimedia fulfills its Public Policy grant
requirements rather than actually being a useful tool for rating and
evaluating articles. (Imagine if you could find the most fascinating
articles, similar to ted.com's system; now look at what Wikimedia has
implemented.) Another example might be an UploadWizard that is focused on
ensuring that Wikimedia fulfills its Multimedia grant requirements rather
than actually being fully developed and ready for use by Wikimedia Commons.

These examples are off the top of my head, but anyone paying attention can
see the trend fairly clearly, I think. The return of Brion as Lead Software
Architect may change some of this, but only time will tell.

> Sophisticated decision mechanism simply does not exist on a community level,
> and those on Foundation level are of little importance. Is it really that hard
> to launch an ideas bank (at ideas.wikimedia.org for example) to boil down what
> the community really needs instead of letting volunteers have endless
> discussions in wiki-style? Will someone finally realize that wiki is not the
> holy-grail of "collaboration" and maybe other tools are needed too?

There were some ideas thrown around about this at some point, though I don't
remember by whom or where. Other large organizations use systems like this
(e.g., Starbucks and KDE or Debian, as I recall). They generally implement
software such as Pligg and the like. It's certainly possible to install
similar software on Wikimedia's servers, but there are large challenges to
overcome such as language barriers and concerns about a pure voting system
that discards rational argument and debate.

If you want something like this, work toward making it happen. Write a
proposal at Meta, investigate options for implementations, file bugs in
Bugzilla, talk to Wikimedia Foundation staff, etc. Rambling e-mails to
foundation-l, while sometimes stress-relieving, don't tend to actually
accomplish much. A little more free advice: if you can convince the
Wikimedia Foundation that your idea/project/proposal is related to
"usability," "fundraising," the "gender gap," or "engaging new users,"
you're much more likely to get attention for it.

MZMcBride