[Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove

[Oliver Keyes]

Speaking personally, the tech department develops features that benefit the
community. The difference is that they, quite rightly, see the "community"
as consisting of both readers and editors. They are developing
editor-specific new features, such as the Zoom interface for
Special:NewPages, as I explained to you in Office Hours just last Thursday.

Switching authorisation and prioritisation over to the editors completely
ignores readers, and assumes that editors will act outside their own
interests to ensure that reader-specific features do get some traction;
given that the last time enwiki reached consensus on a tech development it
was to turn off new page creation for new editors. This is
*clearly*self-interest, and short-sighted self-interest at that - the
stated benefit
was "it cuts down on our workload". You should recognise the dangers of
editor consensus on tech matters given that you voted against it.

Letting editors also assumes that editorial consensus on tech represents
what the vast majority of editors want, and not what a vocal minority of
those few editors who turned up want. Now, a lot of editors are very vocal
about the AFT being a waste of time. Is this representative? No - an actual
survey, rather than a trawling of community pages to see what those editors
who had vocalised their opinions in a specific venue thought, showed that a
*vast* majority consider it A Good Thing.

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 11:17 AM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:

> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 8
> > Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:40:37 +0200
> > From: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove
> > To: fae at wikimedia.org.uk,       Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> >        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Message-ID:
> >        <CAO53wxW=
> UwegSJZgTbk24D69zgd4EOwoGpypKbdQnJqXSEqKMw at mail.gmail.com
> > >
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> >
> > Hoi,
> > I am happy to make a distinction of what I do officially and what I say
> > because I am personally of a particular opinion. This is very much my
> > personal opinion.
> >
> > There have been LOADS of opportunities where the community is asked,
> begged
> > to be involved in what will be the way forward. The most obvious
> > opportunity has been the Strategy project. At this time the Wikimedia
> > Foundation is looking for all sorts of volunteers that are asked to help
> > determine what future functionality will be like. Specifically I want to
> > mention the need for "language support teams" and volunteers for our
> mobile
> > development.
> >
> > The position of the WMF as I know it is that it wants very much an
> involved
> > community. To be effective, it is important for the community to be
> > involved early in the process. Sadly many people want to be only involved
> > at the end of the process. This does not help much and particularly not
> on
> > issues that are not the bread and butter of working on content by the
> > existing community.
> >
> > I made points in my previous mail. They have not been addressed. We agree
> > on the need for community involvement. The WMF has a strong tradition on
> > involving its communities. My argument is that the programs that are
> > discussed are very much monitored for their effect, based on the results
> > the functionality will be tweaked. My argument is that these programs are
> > the result of community consultation and therefore community involvement
> is
> > the origin of the functionality we are discussing.
> > Thanks,
> >      GerardM
> >
> >
> > Hi Gerard,
>
> What changes do and do not require consensus is a fascinating issue, but
> not I think related to my query re Wikilove. Brandon has told us that the
> devs are only installing wikilove on wikis where there is a consensus for
> it.  Hence my request for a link to the discussion that established
> consensus for the introduction of Wikilove on EN wikipedia, as I seem to
> have missed that debate and was having difficulty finding it. I'm not
> trying to reopen the debate, I'm not actually opposed to wikilove if that's
> what a bunch of editors want to volunteer their time for. If it was tweaked
> as per Geni's proposal it might actually become a net positive. I just
> wanted to read the discussion and see how that consensus was achieved. If
> it's true that every wiki except for the EN Wikipedia gets the chance to
> decide whether or not they want it then I wonder why that was the case, and
> what that says about the Foundation's attitude to our largest community of
> editors.
>
> If wikilove was developed on Foundation money then I think it sad that this
> was prioritised above so many more important things. For example a big part
> of any welcome template is this bizarre looking instruction to sign posts
> on talkpages with ~~~~. Aside from the signing business the original design
> of talkpages is way superior and more newby friendly than liquid threads,
> but it could do with one small enhancement; Autosign on talkpages, with the
> preference defaulted to off for anyone who has signed a talkpage and on for
> anyone who hasn't, including of course all new accounts from now onwards.
> Implement that and we can easily improve the welcome templates, and greatly
> reduce the number of newbies who raise a query on a talkpage only to be
> responded with an admonition about their failure to sign their posting.
> Then there is that one little bug in Cat a lot that prevents if from being
> used to tackle the Commons categorisation backlog
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Gadget-Cat-a-lot.js#Hidden_categories_and_GLAMEither
> of those would be way more important than Wikilove, the Article
> Feedback tool or the image filter. On a different scale altogether is the
> question of whether Museums and other GLAMS should skip us and go directly
> to Flickr. Balboa Park has set out fairly clearly why they've taken the
> decision to use Flickr rather than Commons
>
> http://futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/2011/10/building-better-fishing-pole-how.htmlI'd
> like to know how many developers the Foundation has working to catch
> up
> there.
>
> There is a broader point, a willingness to invest in things that might be
> of use to hypothetical groups of potential new editors really shouldn't
> come at the expense of neglecting the needs of the existing editor base. We
> have an editor retention problem and one way to confront that is to invest
> in fixing the problems that those editors raise and improve the tools they
> use. Another is to empower the community and put them in control of their
> projects. Only introducing new features where there is consensus for
> implementation is a step towards that. A bigger step, and a way to get much
> much better value from our IT budget is to get community input on the
> priority of new features. The Image filter referendum made a small step
> towards that by having a question about its importance. A more meaningful
> consultation would be to give editors the ability to rate the relative
> importance of a bunch of potential enhancements "How much do you want
> this?" Should be the second question after "Do you want this?". The least
> lovely feature of Wikilove as with the Article Feedback Tool is to think of
> all the amazing things that could have been done instead.
>
> WereSpielChequers
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