The idea that we are trying to attract new users at the detriment of the existing ones is putting words in our mouths, but I do know what you mean. The good news is that many of us are very conscious about these issues.
Here are some excerpts, for instance from the VisualEditor software design document[1]:
- "Visual editing should first improve the usability of the most common tasks. Less frequent tasks may still be performed using a source code editing mode." - "Visual editing should enhance, not degrade, the ability to inspect what was changed between revisions." - "At the very least, a visual editor should not make more work for administrators and editors who are reviewing edits done by others."
VisualEditor isn't alone in these beliefs, but I realize also that they are not held widely (yet) enough either.
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Software_design#Objectives
- Trevor
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 3:11 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
About colleagues vs. customers: I don't think it can be considered a misunderstanding by the community, it's largely due to what the WMF really wants. The WMF, as the article puts it, doesn't [necessarily] want to work better with the existing community (-> colleagues) by providing what's felt useful /for them/ to get things done; instead, it largely assumes that what's disliked or even plainly harmful now is actually good, if it can attract a new demographic of users which will like it (-> new customers). And more: changing the demographic by ignoring the existing one is sometimes the very aim of changes; community is assumed broken (it scares people off), consensus even more so (we can't get anything decided, we need "leaders" – surely not pre-emptive consensus), nobody is indispensable (we have a big turnover, we only need to improve "_new_ editors retention"). And yes, this sometimes borders social experiments (eugenetics? :-) ). I'm not going to prove all this*; it's nasty to "the community", but there's also a lot of truth in it and all in good faith.
Nemo
(*) I could quote individual WMF developers or officers but that would be tough and unnecessary: it's the official strategy, just seen from a different perspective (by stretching it a bit perhaps).
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