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

[Craig Franklin]

Yes, this.

I must admit, it's tremendously demotivating and makes me quite upset that
people like Aphaia, Anthere, Danny B. and Thehelpfulone, people who have
put hundreds if not thousands of hours of effort into this movement without
asking for a single cent, over many many years, are treated as risks to be
eliminated rather than assets to the movement whose input is to be
treasured.

My main objection is not to the actual act of removing these rights
(although as pointed out above by others, it seems to be a solution looking
for a problem), my main objection is the remarkably callous and hamfisted
way that it was executed.  In particular, I think that making a potentially
controversial change, and referring questions about that change to a
staffer who is "heading out of town and will be unresponsive for a few
days" is probably not good practice at all.

Does anyone from the Foundation honestly think this has been handled well?
 What lessons are there to be learned from this?

Cheers,
Craig



On 12 May 2013 10:31, Thomas Goldammer <thogol at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Anyway, nothing would have been lost if Gayle had written to the folks a
> few weeks before the actual action was performed, informing that this is
> the plan and why. It's not necessary, WMF owns the page and can do just
> about everything there, but just for politeness it would have been nice.
> And yes, the email that - seemingly selectively - got sent out was not
> really diplomatic, either, it sounds much like "thanks, bye!". Or was there
> any sort of emergency that made an immediate action indispensable? (A soon
> explanation by Gayle would certainly be helpful there.)
>
> Th.
>
>