Erik Moeller wrote:
This is why on all major sites, you see a gradual
ramp-up of a new
feature, and continued improvement once it's widely used. Often
there's an opt-in and then an opt-out to ease users into the change.
But once a change is launched, it very rarely gets rolled back unless
it's just clearly not doing what it's supposed to. Yes, we can all
agree that we need to continually raise the bar for how we build
software (without getting into analysis paralysis) -- but that doesn't
mean that reverting (here or in other cases) once there's an ad hoc
vote (or two, or three) is the right thing to do.
No other significantly sized organization follows the development
methodology you're proposing WMF should follow. Certainly, WMF is an
unusual organization, and we have every desire to take concerns
seriously, engage with people, scrutinize data honestly, and work
iteratively to make things better for everyone. What we can't and
won't accept is the idea that admin-reverts of features are an OK way
to try to enforce the outcome of an ad hoc poll or vote.
Is there anything that the German Wikipedia could do to convince you to
disable MediaViewer there? Some percentage of active users showing up to
say so? Some percentage of users (logged-in or otherwise) disabling the
feature? (Presumably we can get stats of some kind.) I'm curious what it
would take for you to change course here.
We should note that your behavior on the German Wikipedia has resulted in
you being blocked there for a month. I get the sense that many people on
the German Wikipedia feel as though there's no way you'll ever be
convinced to disable MediaViewer. And from the comments I've been reading,
this incident, along with others, has done significant damage to both your
reputation and the reputation of the Wikimedia Foundation.
We can - and should, and do - talk to figure things
out. We can - and
should, and do - work out compromises. (And we did indeed agree to
implement a compromise solution for Commons.) But the idea that WMF
always must slavishly execute the result of a poll or vote is neither
rational nor sustainable, nor has it ever been practice --- much less
controversially so in situations where WMF's decisions cannot be
overriden by admins employing JavaScript hacks.
You've not established an overriding interest here. If this issue related
to online harassment or child protection or biographies of living people
or the ability of users to edit or copyright or something else that
matters, it might make sense for you to step in.
But we're discussing an entirely supplementary feature. A few wikis (three
by my count) have tried MediaViewer and have decided that they'd rather
not have it be opt-out on their wiki. Instead they'd prefer that
MediaViewer be opt-in for now. These communities have politely requested
a configuration change, which should be within the purview of Wikimedia
stewards, but MediaWiki doesn't yet have a graphical configuration user
interface. Why deny these seemingly reasonable requests?
MZMcBride