On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:05 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote: <snip>
There is a bit of amnesia about the fact that almost all editors are also readers and regular users of the projects we create, and those editors have been encouraged since Day One to inform developers of any technical problems with the site; they're the canaries in the coal mine. And for anyone who's been editing more than 3-4 years (an ever-increasing percentage of the editing community), "software" issues were things they had to pretty much solve themselves within the volunteer community. For years, most developers were volunteers too, and had close links to the editing community. At least a good portion of you remember those days - because you used to be those volunteer developers that community members would hit up to fix things, and you used to watch the village pumps to figure out what else needed to be fixed. Until very recently, it was almost unheard-of for community members to be told that problematic things were going to stay that way because of a decision made by a small number of people in an office somewhere. When most developers were clearly participating as community members, they behaved as though they were, at least to a significant extent, accountable to both the editing and Mediawiki communities; I'm not sure that sense of accountability exists anymore. Now, I don't think anyone begrudges the many talented developers who started off within the community having taken the opportunity to move on to paid positions at the WMF, and I think on the whole the big-picture community is overall very happy with the majority of changes that have come with the increased professionalization of the site engineering and operations. But this is a major change in culture, and the gulf between volunteers (either developer or editor) and WMF staff is widening noticeably as time progresses. I could tell who was a volunteer and who was staff from the way their posts were responded to in this thread; I doubt that would have been the case even two years ago.
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Which gulf is growing more quickly - between the WMF staff and volunteers, or between the veteran editing population and the typical reader? I won't argue that there is some distance, and a degree of conflict, between the goals and priorities of the staff and many veteran volunteers. But this distance hasn't occurred organically. It's been introduced consciously, and mentioned on a number of occasions, by WMF leaders like Sue and Erik. They have often made the point that the WMF has to consider first the hundreds of millions of readers who compose our intended audience.
No one has said, that I've seen, that complaints and problems from the editing community should be ignored. But I think Steve and Jon are struggling with how to react to complaints without knowing how representative they are of the reader experience. If complaints are presented by a tiny percentage of the editing community, how many should they assume are encountering the problem but not reporting it? If readership numbers don't change, and people who login to complain are definitionally lumped into "editors", how do we assess the impact on readers and whether or not many readers are having difficulty?
These aren't easy questions to answer. Many people complaining about this change, and others, seem to make different automatic assumptions about relevance and impact than the WMF staff, or they don't consider it at all. To be fair to the engineering staff, we should keep in mind that they have to relate complaints from developers and editors to the experience of hundreds of millions of readers and make decisions principally (but not wholly) based on the latter, not the former.