The people who were actually responsible were the community. Erik was
acting in a preventative role to prevent further disruption not punish
administrators. The community. couldn't take no for an answer and what has
happened?
* Wheel/edit wars
* A new user right to prevent disruption
* A priviledge has been revoked on dewiki
* A user has been desysoped by the community for no reason on dewiki
And who are we blaming? Erik. Why? Because we are a bunch of stubborn
children. We don't get what we want so we are kicking and screaming to get
it but in the end; we don't and we then accuse our parent (WMF) of being
too harsh, mean and taking away something we like but do not deserve.
To be honest - until we as a community learn we are not the overlords, the
masters, god of
Wikimedia, we can work to building a real encyclopedia with awesome feature
where are all work in a good environment and get on as a community and
Foundation.
I am not saying the WMF is perfect and is not in the wrong; they certainly
have some blame to take and I will come onto that shortly, but we can not
blame the Foundation for revoking something we clearly do not deserve.
Erik, While I will say you have not been
communicating stuff the best you
can and this new user right was proxy deployed by Tim and an advocate and
not your self - you mean well and I see this. I agree with everything you
have done so far as a matter of fact.
Fabrice, Have you attempted to start any discussions with communities in
exactly why they don't want Media Viewer and how exactly it causes so much
dispute that it requires Erik to proxy intervene? It not, please do so.
In a short conclusion - I feel both parties have acted inappropriately and
our bitching at each other does far than solve it. The WMF had to implement
a new right and revoke dewiki's access to their site wide js page because
of their refusal to accept what the WMF said and want to create a
performance killer hack to 'fix it' at the cost of performance. Why did
dewiki have to do this? The WMF refusing to disable Media Viewer. From what
I see, the WMF have backed up by they refused to do this for Wikipedias and
their compromise for Commons is acceptable. I have yet to see a valid
reason why Media Viewer exactly makes Wikipedia go into a 'OMG UNUSABLE
DISABLE IT FUCKING NOW OR I WILL' state. Media Viewer allows you to view
and images without leaving the page - reducing load time for both users and
the WMF. It is hardly the beginning if the end for images.
If we take a quick look at the statistics - 64 voted against Media Viewer
on the English Wikipedia while 6kish users enabled it, this shows 1.1%
consensus for disabling the extension in a whole.
I will not ramble on any more. I just ask the community to stop bitching at
the WMF and accept their decision. Until then - I fully support Erik super
protecting every single js and CSS page on every wiki as most Sysop I feel
are technically incompetent.
John Lewis
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John Lewis