On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 1:36 PM, Jimmy Wales jimmywales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
We went back and forth in pleasant emails discussing the situation and as a part of that I said: "I am always in favor of more community consultation." I went on to discuss a bit that I didn't think we were at the point where a full-scale community consultation (like the one that legal did on revising the terms of service) was necessary for a mere $250,000 grant. But I was supportive of consulting the community.
Here is what I don't understand: both Dariusz and James have said that they pushed hard for transparency and community engagement about the project at that time, and expressed concern that there hadn't been any. Do you not remember that? Yet nothing happened.
If they were in favour, and you were in favour, why didn't it happen? Who resisted?
Why was there resistance from other board members to even show James and Dariusz the documentation that was later leaked?
And there are things in the FAQs even today, like the plans for "public curation or relevance",[1][2] that are of material interest to volunteers, because they are the ones envisaged to be doing that work.
Wikimedia volunteers have never been called upon to determine search engine rankings. It's a whole new field of activity.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/RFC [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/FAQ