On Mon, 11 Aug 2014, at 22:40, MZMcBride wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
I think the most helpful thing would be to not attempt to start wars, and particularly not on behalf of anyone or against individuals. We are all on the same side here: trying to make the projects (and the project interfaces, as a part of that) better. That includes, for instance, trying out a new way of viewing photographs.
I assume of course and as always that you send your message from a place of also wanting the projects to be better and more usable. But it is hard to see how anything you suggest above gets us there.
A few weeks ago, Erik reverted on the English Wikipedia and created a storm of drama in the process.
Our community is fragile. It keeps making drama fuss out of policies and rules. Every newcomer to a Wikipedia (surprisingly, by far not to every other sister project) who vandalises is shown a policy page. Every newcomer who wants to create an article is shown a policy page (the pesky notability concept). The Help:* namespace is underused, and Manual:* namespace is also underused.
Our community, or its active part (let's say, clique) is enjoying that it has an "advantage" over the masses. It is "Wikipedians" and the other people are nobody. When someone in power above them makes a step, the clique resists and makes drama. Is that the way to live, people?
We need to go write content. Write tools which help to write content. Write software which we would like to see. It's not all at all hard. The WMF can also do what it likes: in the first place, it's their webserver. And it's not at all hard to work together, either, granted you can edit their tools as required for your needs.
What WM ENG need to do is communicate about their things early, while they're started writing them. They've started working on "Winter" and I only noticed because it was linked on MW.org. There needs to be a central place, like the Wikimedia blog, but dedicated to tech things - actively announcing everything WM ENGINEERING are doing, both in products and in core. It's all lovely and wonderful to /reuse/ in our own projects, and to add new code to their software as needed.
I'm struggling to determine what exactly causes this desire to cause drama. A large part of it is, in my view, lack of a mechanism to remove people who have such a habit.