[Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

[phoebe ayers]

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz at twkozlowski.net
> wrote:

>
> These are questions directed at the WMF—for you regular folks, I have a
> riddle (I'll give a WikiLove barnstar to the first person to submit a
> correct answer). There is /at least/ one community member who does not hold
> any official position within the WMF, and who has not been desysopped in
> yesterday's purge—do you know who this person is?
>

If you're talking about me (I still seem to have admin rights, and no
official position) I'll happily give up my admin flag -- not sure why I was
left out of the batch. At any rate, I haven't edited much on the wmf wiki
since last year; I just had admin rights so i could move files around when
I was board secretary.

As for the whole thing -- it seems like especially poor timing and
communication around the action. It also seems dumb to desysop some of the
users who know the most about how to format and work with wikis. On the
other hand, the WMF wiki is special -- as the home of material from the
organization that basically does not get changed -- and I know there's been
some incidents, as Sue refers to, of reversals of staff decisions that led
to a lot of misunderstandings. I, and I suspect most of us, just take this
in stride because it's happened to us dozens of times; newer staff may not,
however.

Going forward I'd still support merging most of WMF wiki into meta, where
we can use a normal community admin process; and keeping a limited version
of it around for version-of-record documents and whatever technical needs
re: fundraising it fills, and simply being a lot more clear about policies
around that content.

-- phoebe

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