[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas at googlemail.com
> wrote:

> >
> > 1) WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
> > Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the
> > respective project communities.
> >
> >
> Uh oh - criticism time...
>
> WikiLove was developed supposedly to address one of the major problems of
> English Wikipedia (a problem which also affects other Wiki's to a larger or
> lesser extent). It is an example of a solution being developed by those
> without a full understanding of the problem (which is no criticism of the
> devs involved; there is no reason they should understand the issues in
> depth).


Wikilove was produced by Ryan Kaldari, and active Wikimedian and participant
on this list as well as a staffer, pretty much on his own time (from what I
understood as he explained it to me).  I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm off
point, there.  I don't think he was out of touch with the issues in depth...


> It was ten deployed with minimal discussion, once again
> demonstrating the lack of links between the developers and the community
> (because just about anyone could have pointed out it would have been
> controversial).
>

It was deployed with minimal discussion, but I still wouldn't assign the
blame to devs not understanding the community.  You're making some pretty
big assumptions.


-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan