On 2016-02-21 09:52, Jane Darnell wrote:
Risker thanks for this. I would add that the biggest problem for outsiders is trying to sift through the emails in this thread, looking for valid concerns and first-hand accounts among the cynical and/or ironic comments only understandable to a few players. As more and more of our international community tries to read and follow along on these developments, let's please stick to some ground rules: no irony, no cynicism, no rehashing old mistakes if they are irrelevant. Challenging, but necessary if you want more foreign chapter members to hear or take part in this conversation.
Let me give my perspective, since I believe an important part of the puzzle is missing or at least underappreciated on this list. I am not going to offer any solutions, I do not pretend I known more than other people know, but I do feel that this piece is needed to understand the big picture.
To give some background, I am just a volunteer. I am, you know, writing articles. I have administrator permissions on four projects (en.wp, ru.voy, Commons, and Wikidata), and I have globally about 200K non-bot edits from my two accounts, which is probably more than for most posters of this thread. I never worked for WMF, I have never been a member of any chapter, but I did participate in some committees and juries and whatever. I interacted with WMF staff in different roles - as WMF staff and also in their roles as volunteers on the projects. I am generally interested in Meta-issues and I am on this list since I believe 2007.
Now, I (and from what I know, other people as well) at some point started to have problems with WMF staff whose tasks were to facilitate our job. Not to say that everything was stellar before and that everything was stellar after, but the most difficult period started around 2013, definitely when Sue was the ED, and ended (or at least things went considerably better) in 2015, long after Lila became the ED. For people who were just writing articles there was nothing to change, but whenever someone wanted to do smth with requied interaction with WMF there was a large amount of red tape. WMF staff members were polite, but I did not get an impression that they listened to what we said - there were just assigned to do some work and they did not care what volunteers thought about it. The first major bell ring for me was when Gayle Karin Young removed the admin rights of all non-staff from the WMF wiki, without even notifying them - and then for several weeks nobody wanted to take responsibility and I believe in the end nobody apologized, and the wiki went into a pitiful state where I believe it still remains, so that this action was not only rude but also counterproductive. I could not easily find when it happened, but definitely before January 2014, when Gayle Karin left WMF. (Note that Lila started in May 2014). This is not such a big deal - in the end of the day, I never edited this wiki, and I am not sure it was needed - but it was a clear sign that you can invest quite some time in doing a good maintenance job which nobody wanted to do, and one day you just get a message "Hey, we have a change of the policy and decided you are no longer welcome here". Other things include superprotect, FLOW, VE early rollout on en.wp, toolserver, and a lot of lower-profile issues. Things started to improve considerably middle of the last year - first we were not just laughed at, and then most of the things (not all of them though - and also for example the Wikimania screwup happened in the end of the year) were reverted or shelved. Now I would define the relations as quasi-normal, with a number of really good things happening.
Again, I do not know who is right and who is wrong here, we have excellent examples of WMF staff work all the time through (let me name Maggie Dennis as an example of someone who is doing excellent work as both WMF staffer and a project volunteer, and there are more examples), but things definitely went suboptimal in that period. Volunteers can any moment, you know, walk away, and without them, WMF projects would die.
Cheers Yaroslav