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

[K. Peachey]

(Inline comments most likely, So shoot me)

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> …
> But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden
> decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think
> that's ever been a huge problem:
> …

Can you expand on this? I haven't really involved in foundationwiki
and I'm not going to go check all the edits for this, But this seems
like a kindly odd-shaped argument in my view. (The only time I was
involved with a staff-vol spat on wmfwiki, is when the staff member
decided the to need to take it to another wiki and then onto IRC as
well, where I and others had to bug staff members to find out whom
they were reporting to)

I highly doubt volunteers are just "randomly" undoing edits of staff
"just because", We should be looking at the underlining issues behind
this, with what they are trying to fix and improving the workflow of
staff and volunteers. Just /randomly/ revoking seems counter-proactive
and detrimental to this.

> …
> So I would say this:
>
> This decision is not about "the community" versus "the WMF." This decision
> is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work on
> the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness.

How many staff members that have jobs that rely on editing
foundationwiki? I did a quick scan of the last ~1000 or so edits and
really couldn't see any examples that stood out, If a volunteer
changes a staff edit, Yes it should be looked at but there is
generally a good reason (I've seen plently of staff members editing
other wikis that are clueless about the wiki world and people have
been fixing up their edits), And just removing admin rights doesn't
seem to have anything to do with that at all, Because the volunteers
can still edit (afaik the only rights they really loose are delete and
protect now)

> …
> This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities…

Not really, It was done "randomly" and at the end of a Friday when
most of the foundation stops working for the weekend, with lack of
meaningful communication to those involved (or in some cases,
communication at al), Personally it leaves more questions than
anything.

> …
> Personally, I feel like
> we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We
> don't pay staff to edit the projects:

I know at least one staff on a project, that has a bit to do with
there work, and has been directed to append "staff" to all their edit
summaries.

-Crazed ramblings out,
Peachey