[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Nathan]

We need to keep in mind that the people who are vocal on mailing
lists, or who participate in on-wiki polls with 50 or 100
participants, represent only a tiny fraction of all Wikimedia users -
even only a small fraction of those who are active and registered. Yet
the constituency of the WMF must be all present users, as well as
everyone who might become a user in the future.

The Foundation can't surrender to the inertia and change-resistance of
long-term editors, because this serves the bulk of its constituency
quite poorly. I understand why Todd thinks the WMF should only rarely
override the community, and in some respects I agree. But MediaWiki
and the user interface are the WMF's core product, and a small
minority of vocal resistance should not be the deciding factor in
rolling out new features.

That said, the statistics referred to in another thread by James
Salsman and Robert Rohde are troubling and deserve serious attention
by Erik and the product team. Those combined with the negative
reaction of vocal long-term users should be a big red flag that the
team needs to begin communicating much more clearly and being much
more (visibly) attentive to potential problems. It boggles my mind, to
be honest, that the WMF continues to run into these PR crises without
having thought through deeply engaging communication plans and
feedback loops.

~Nathan