On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 22:19, Yair Rand yyairrand@gmail.com wrote:
I'm getting so many red flags.
Established by WMF via secret (non-transparent) process, with no community involvement? Non-wiki environment, with the same scope as existing wikis? WMF-decided conduct policies? Every single moderator is a WMF employee? Forum using closed groups, with non-transparent communication? (Closed-source software, unless I'm mistaken?) So far outside Wikimedia spaces that the only place it was even _announced_ was an off-wiki mailing list?
Is there something the Wikimedia Foundation would like to tell us?
-- Yair Rand
While I agree that a good tracking mount, a reasonable telescope and some CCDs would be a better use of the money (there are some satellites I want pics of) I don't see anything particular nefarious here. Improving communications is a long term goal and shifting away from mediawiki appears on the face of it a good way to do that (we are after all on a mailing list at the moment. In practice experience suggests that most people are too busy doing what they are already doing to get involved in such projects and that mediawiki is so central to what we are do that most people are pretty comfortable with it.
So this falls well within the WMF’s nominal goals and is a fairly understandable approach. I still think we would be better off spending the money on the kit needed to get a pic of Kosmos 482.