On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
2014-08-12 16:57 GMT+02:00 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com:
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 3:19 PM, rupert THURNER <
rupert.thurner@gmail.com>
wrote:
so i did not vote. because i can live with both. but i do respect the
vote.
i do respect admin decisions, i even voted for some admins.
at the end it is very simple. the one who produces software has a
conflict
of interest. so this person or organisation is not in a good position
to
decide when it is used.
wmf, its employees and voluntary officers need to be exemplary with
respect
to conflicts of interest, imo. always. errors are allowed as well as excuses of course.
There needs to be a balance between the wishes of (some members of) the logged-in community, the (otherwise silent) majority of readers, and the WMF.
True
German Wikipedia had 1.1 billion page views in June [1]. ~300 votes (~2/3
against MediaViewer) do not represent the readers, IMHO.
I think it is more relevant to look at the number of unique visitors, in stead of the 1.1 billion page views.
I agree, but I couldn't find that number on the report card, so I used the next best thing. Assuming 100 page views per visitor would give 10M visitors. 80M people in Germany alone, so probably not too far off. That would mean that 0.003% of visitors voted, and 0.002% voted against MediaViewer, with a ~0.001% "edge".
The Foundation is tasked with managing the hardware and software that runs
Wikipedia. On Wikimania, several remarks were made about how outdated Wikipedia appears. WMF tries to improve that situation. No, MediaViewer
is
not perfect. What software is? When is it "perfect" enough to go live by default? WMF should have a say there.
I agree that WMF should have a say, but how it is done now is certainly not the way WMF should handle it. Also I think it would be good to define for future cases how such situations should be handled. If a community has a strong oppose in something, such situation should be considered more carefully and be handled with more care. A community can't represent all readers, but they are themselves readers too who feel to have a large responsibility to the readers. They usually have valid arguments and considerations which should be taken more seriously. We all are on the same ship with the same vision on the horizon, with the same goals.
Yes, it could have been handled better. Actually, just saying "this is coming by default, you can turn it off individually" /before/ the "vote" was initiated would have been much clearer, and I don't think it would have caused as much uproar as we have now. It also could have helped to focus the community on finding and reporting bugs, which might have lead to earlier improvements to the software.
And yes, the community should have a say, but this is a rather technical issue, even if it is an interface change. The community is, and always has been, very much in charge of content and editorial policies, beyond the pillars.
Finally, I think that an open and detailed description by the WMF about what, exactly, happened, and why MediaViewer is pushed against the wishes of a small but vocal group, would help a lot to smooth the waves.
Cheers, Magnus