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User talk:LilaTretikov (WMF)/Archive 9

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Latest comment: 9 years ago by KaiMartin in topic Respect

Email adresses for volunteers

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Dear Lila Tretikov,

your input would be very welcome at meta:Wikimedia Forum#Wikimedia volunteer email adresses.

Sincerely, Taketa (talk) 06:44, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

I will ask the team to review. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 05:02, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Charter of Wikimedia Movement (WMM)

Latest comment: 9 years ago104 comments12 people in discussion
WMF. Matrix of Participation by iCIV
Levels of participation
and influence of iCIV 		Six circular steps
of a WMF-process
Partnership +++
   Agenda setting  ► Drafting  
  ▲   ▼  
 Reformulation  ↻  Decision 
  ▲   ▼  
   Monitoring  ◄  Implementation   
Dialogue ++
Consultation +
Information 0
This figure is a derivate of an adoption by the    
Congress of International Non Governmental Organisation (CE)[1]

The Wikipedia Movement (WMM) is an out-standing project and its developement must be out-standing too to stick to the successful basic idea: Testing new proposals of cooperation beyond existing limits. In Working Together Lila Tretikov as the Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has anounced an approach of a new Wikipedian Life at New Frontiers (-4 days[calculation valid till Nov 19, 2014 1] to go till publishing). Wellcome to all explorers on the new track of cooperation, diversity and subsidiarity, the future Guiding Principles of Wikimedia Movement (WMM) – This shall be On the Scale of Billons. Next - let´s try a Request for Comment (RfC): Charter of Wikimedia Movement (WMM-Charter) - with Lila´s new proposals as a solid base to develope further requirements and on-going interests of the international Community of Individual Volunteers (iCIV).

Hongkong, San Francisco. You name it! WMF has responsibilies to develope the free knowlegde of the world and its own organizational conditions so people can contribute in a ballanced way of mutual interests and diversity growing - in a world changing day after day, fate by fate. --Edward Steintain (talk) 05:25, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
P.S. Please, don't give people instructions but set new trends how to cooperate as partners at every level.

  1. ↑ The underlying computing expression to calculate a difference of days was only valid till November 19, 2014.
  1. ↑ Code of Good Practice for Civil Participation in the Decision-Making Process, Background, Council of Europe (dtsch: Europarat), Konferenz der INGOs (internationale Nichtregierungsorganisationen), PDF 118 kB; (deutsch: Verhaltenskodex für die Bürgerbeteiligung im Entscheidungsprozess; Matrix der Bürgerbeteiligung: siehe Seite 18 des PDFs)
The Wikimedia Foundation has no rightful claim to speak for the movement, and —sorry to be blunt— has certainly abrogated the right to talk about 'working together" since their recently demonstrated policy has been to tell the community to go screw themselves. --Pi zero (talk) 14:12, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
I declare: The term Movement (WMM) and its definition are in possession of the Movement of the international Commutity of Individual Vontunteers (WMM of iCIV) participating with Wikimedia. iCIV as the community and movement shall write the Charter of Wikimedia Movement applying the good idea of Bylaws: ARTICLE II - STATEMENT OF PURPOSE too. iCIV shall coordinate contributions of WMF – to be fair to WMF while iCIV is developing the Charter of Wikimedia Movement (WMM). I tend giving to check the idea of cooperation, diversity, and subsidiarity a chance - despite of … (please teach me what I must do to forgive.) --Edward Steintain (talk) 18:15, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
What is really important here is that Edward is looking forward into what needs to be done, vs. what has been done. We have a rich and important history, yet my (and yours if you choose to accept it) job is to ensure we are healthy and relevant in the future -- in the world that is rapidly evolving. With that, I am watching for those who are willing and able to engage in looking forward. -- LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
Lila, in your position there's a trap you can easily fall into. The problem is, where to set your threshold for who to respond to. There's no point in responding to cranks... right? But, suppose you were, for whatever reason, in the position of advocating something that, for reasons you're not seeing, was a truly bad idea. If you set out to only respond to people who are "being productive", and if your definition of "being productive" excludes those who say what you're doing is a truly bad idea, then you may end up, for seemingly practical and non-ideological reasons, preventing yourself from becoming aware that what you're doing is a truly bad idea. The problem is further compounded if you've come into the middle of a situation that's been brewing for a long time, and resentments are already running high; because this will tend to raise the level of annoyance and distrust by those speaking to you from certain perspectives, and if you disregard comments based on annoyance/distrust level you will therefore end up disregarding comments based on perspective.
What I see here is that you're starting from the assumption that certain kinds of things "have" to be done, and those who say they don't have to be done will get statistically filtered out of dialog with you. I'm not saying this is an easy problem to solve; that's yet another thing I don't like about AGF, that it tries to trivialize a genuinely difficult problem. The current negotiations being hosted by Egypt between Israel and Hamas are described as "indirect negotiations", which as best I can figure means these folks can't stand each other to the point where they probably can't even be safely put in the same room together, so the Egyptians have to go back and forth between them. But it's important to recognize that it is a problem; that your quest for civil dialog can sometimes isolate you from things when you most need to hear them. --Pi zero (talk) 20:17, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
I think I am pretty clear that I embrace discourse. I think plurality of opinions is important to progress. What I am staying clear of is emotional wight that brings no additional benefit to conversations. I do not plan to engage in shouting matches, insults, or sarcasm. Not only do I think it is bad form, I think it is damaging to our culture and our project. This does not mean I don't like anyone personally and that I would not talk to them: I would be happy to speak with anyone who is genuinely and mutually respectful. -- LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
"I think I am pretty clear that I embrace discourse." You do enunciate this claim clearly. However, saying that is easy and, given the history here, carries no weight. When you say something like (as you did say, just above)
What is really important here is that Edward is looking forward into what needs to be done, vs. what has been done. We have a rich and important history, yet my (and yours if you choose to accept it) job is to ensure we are healthy and relevant in the future -- in the world that is rapidly evolving. With that, I am watching for those who are willing and able to engage in looking forward.
what that sounds like is, you are willing to listen to someone who agrees with you in the agenda you have decided is "necessary" in order to do what you have defined as "moving forward" (well, okay, maybe it's the agenda your employer has instructed you to beleive is necessary). In other words, those who disagree with you are not looking forward and therefore aren't to be listened to. There's good reason to suppose that's what your words actually mean, because Jan-Bart's statement a while back overtly stated that anyone in the community who disagrees with the way the Foundation has decided to go should leave. That was followed by that extraordinarily tone-deaf joint letter from you and Erik.
Here's a peripherally related anecdote. Somewhere in all this I was describing the interactive tools I'm developing, the discussion got into specifics, and I remarked that —as is routine with wikis— when occasionally you need a bit of markup that's complicated, you'll usually be able to just copy a similar bit previously written for a similar purpose, and make the obvious changes for what you need now. The response I got was a sneer about "cargo-cult programming". The lesson of this story: Imitation is at the forefront of how non-text wiki markup gets written. By expressing contempt for that technique, the respondent was expressing contempt for ordinary wiki contributors. That's the deep-seated default attitude from which a typical professional programmer would likely start when contemplating the volunteer community of an open wiki. You won't get wiki-nurturing decisions, large or small, out of that kind of environment, whatever "compensating" measures you try to take.
You're in a difficult position: you have to simultaneously go about making decisions in the right way and end up making the right decisions. When you don't listen to things you don't want to hear (and your remark that I quoted above is essentially stating that intention), some people may object on procedural grounds; but you're also going to get yourself in trouble on the making-wrong-decisions front. --Pi zero (talk) 13:18, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
In -4 days Lila will present a new approach of cooperation and WMF has a historical chance to out itself as a supporter of the New World of participation by Cooperation, Diversity, and Subsidiarity. In this situation I set a nomark (dtsch: Neinzeichen): Two opposit dots at the Phoenician N. (Dtsch: Das um zwei gegenüberliegende Punkte ergänzte phönizische N wird als neues Satzzeichen zur kulturellen Bewährung angeboten und Neinzeichen oder Verneinungszeichen (engl.: Negationmark) genannt. Es markiert das Ende eines Satzes mit einer Ablehnung. In seiner kulturellen Wirkung signalisiert das Neinzeichen den Bedarf zur Kooperation: Die Punkte als Opponenten stehen sich einander gegenüber, nähern sich anfangs auf abweichenden Wegen, um sich dann auf einer gemeinsamen und verbindenden Linie zu treffen.)
… en:nomark/de:Neinzeichen: Yes of cause, say NO and keep on marking it. But starting as one of the opposit dots keep on trying to meet on the nomark-middleline with common (bilateral) interests. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:11, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Nomark has been called Negationmark (Negociationmark, Neinzeichen, Verneinungszeichen), too ;-) Let´s try to be aware of listening to NO and then get together, you can call coordination too (Say it in Old broken WMF English: coordination!)
WMF is in competition, said by LT (SF). What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding? Is WMF getting old? The future of WMF and WMM: when the last bubble is plopping. Please give me a straw to hang and blow on! WMF has severe problems to meet marketing demands of contributors and customers. As a warning a nomark (negationmark, dtsch: Neinzeichen) was set. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:04, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Is Wikimedia Movement a historical repercussion of conciliate or collide? In a few days (-4) we shall know. --Edward Steintain (talk) 07:32, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
The expression shows a negative number for about a week... So, did you find out..? --Martynas Patasius (talk) 01:42, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
It was a calculation for a certain time of duration. The underlying computing expression to calculate a difference of days was only valid till November 19, 2014.</ref> Thanks for asking. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:11, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
Please let me suggest that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF, the donator of the wiki-idea) and Wikimedia Movement (WMM, the donator by contribution), represented by the international Community of Individual Vonlunteers (iCIV) shall ask the International Non-Governmental Organizations of the Council of Europe (INGO of CE) for support to develope the Charter of Wikimedia Movement (Chater of WMM). --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:08, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
Cooperation evolves if I am prepared to wait with an attitude of tolerance in a situation of diversity. A nomark (negationmark) signals the demand for bilateral developement and the retention of newcomers and oldhanders ready for foot voting (which accually means shunning – no cooperation). --Edward Steintain (talk) 10:00, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

The What´s To Do List of Charter of WMM (QIOP)

I will ask my staff to review these as we circle back to the working together process around product and as we work on the community consultation for programs. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

Questions

  1. WMM as an organisation of WMF and iCIV is in a wilderness of interpersonal interaction. The administrations of WMF and the Chapters of iCIV overrule commitments of the wiki-idea in a battle of their underdeveloped rules of cooperation. Who is going to describe what tolerance realy means to WMM (call it double-u / double-m, Wikimedia Movement) in future? --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:35, 26 November 2014 (UTC) A Nomark points out objections. Some need a nomark to realize that there are problems. Lots of nomarks signal the urgent demand for change. Please, let´s try to give Nomark an ASCII-Code. A mutual Nomark is quite unbloody.
  2. Who is a specialist for the practical application of cooperation? – Please name one or three names for every continent/chapter to enshure diversity and subsidiarity. --Edward Steintain (talk) 08:43, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
  3. Is WMF going to develope the splendid Wiki-idea to be the first global internet-based Tante-Emma-Laden of free knowlegde? --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:01, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
  4. Cooperation is based on trust. Which signals inspire trustworthiness? --Edward Steintain (talk) 06:33, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
  5. What are the most important first hundred words of the world and what comes first in this list: Knowlegde or Cooperation? --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:18, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
  6. Small events of daily wikipedian life – simple details: http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikiviewstats/ is not working any more. Which intervention ruined the project? Who's investigation clarifies this? --Edward Steintain (talk)
  7. Does the wiki-idea need advertisment for the new deal: Cooperation? (Please compare Informations, Nr. 7). --Edward Steintain (talk) 22:49, 4 December 2014 (UTC)
  8. Will new administrators and WMF-staff have to participate in a basic training programm about cooperation to get a licence to apply for administrator-election or to be a WMF-supporter of the iCIV = international Community of Individual Volunteers? (WMF and WMM have no certified quality-management = global Tante Emma Laden of free knowledge in future) --Edward Steintain (talk) 23:02, 4 December 2014 (UTC) | staff training: compare foreign chambers of commerce in Chile.
    Solution. Costs are estimated to be 50 to 100 k€ to develope a basic training programm of cooperation and tolerance. Particiation in a training programm is as everthing in the WMM absolutely voluntarily. What to gain by a c&t-training (the mission statement) shall be developed by WMM and WMF in cooperation/coordination. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:07, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
    It takes about the same amount to develope and introduce the programm „Train-the-Trainer of c&t“ who are the one´s to transfer principles of cooperation and tolerance to WMM and WMF. --Edward Steintain (talk) 12:46, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
    On this possible way to future do not hesitate to contribute your objection. Mark it with a preliminary acronym of the new nomark (dtsch. Neinzeichen, Neinzeichen is a Satzzeichen). As an acronym of a nomark use :ϟ. Every voice counts! Dare to write YES! or NO:ϟ or I DON'T KNOW? in public and mark it as your personal contribution to the community you are living in and how it shall be developed. Good luck --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:48, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
  9. What has been lost or is rotten with the wiki-idea if I am the only one who is testing QIOP? How is the community handling new suggestion? Is this a wikipedian ha-ha – keep unpredictible living lifestock out? Peace and tolerance: Everthing is on a voluntary base - just like a bit of life! --Edward Steintain (talk) 23:17, 5 December 2014 (UTC)
  10. Is the process of developement unstructured in part? (please compare Where are we?) The Working together of WMM and WMF requires a commitment to ISO 9000+. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:11, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
  11. Failures happen. Do WMM and WMF need a critical incident reporting system (deutsch de:CIRS) with contributions by anonymously written letters as part of a quality management which will support cooperation? --Edward Steintain (talk) 07:27, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
  12. Cooperation and tolerance need to have a nursery. In some chapters or parts of WMF inherited developements are not productive by the means of cooperation and tolerance. Does Wikipedia need patrols (dtsch Streife) to enshure cooperation and tolerance and to suggest to the one how is meant to be an offender a discussion and inviting the one „who has been picked up“ to participate (on a subsidiarity base) to talk with trained „cooperation specialists“ of WMM and WMF? --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:30, 13 December 2014 (UTC) (This is a suggestion to Don't excluded:ϟ. Give a chance for inclusion!)
  13. Losing contributors. Could one reason possibly be bullying in one or the other chapter? (Janice Harper, Ph.D.: Three Faces of Bullying, Psychology Today, New York, March 22, 2013 in Beyond Bullying). --Edward Steintain (talk) 17:35, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
  14. Wiki is a very successful idea millions are contributing to. Who is meant if Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is writing we? --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:48, 19 December 2014 (UTC) We do not appreciate the we of WMF – we declare which is me being a voluntary member of Wikimedia Movement (WMM).
  15. During zwo or three thousand years mankind has worked very hard to understand tolerance and paid a lot. The next step will be positive reciprocity – I suggest. This shall be called cooperation beyond the reciprocity known today. Wiki is not post-modern any more, it is going to be „structured cooperation“ which will be developed after having started with free knowledge. What shall we do with free knowledge next? Push the broom on-wiki? Consensus is getting old (while wiki is still young) and has to be adapted. Cooperation is only named once on Consensus. --84.62.140.174 19:28, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
  16. Could it be possible that WMF was wounded or is suffering from conflicts and some battles and is now getting to the stage of bargaing? iCIV (WMM) has a strong hand to reach out. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:21, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Informations

  1. Prototype of WMM-Charter: WMF pays for professional assistance to develope structured cooperation in the chapters which shall narrow or close the gap between the rule-ridden Wikipediator and the brave (new) Contributor. The easiest way of cooperation is to be tolerant by simply waiting instead of executing immediately. --Edward Steintain (talk) 09:36, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
  2. Solution. It only needs a couple of 100.000 Euros or US-Dollars per selected chapter (as a prototype) to simulate new structures of cooperation under professional assistance. The Wiki-idea is a precussor of developements pointing into future of now-a-day mankind: This means structured cooperation. Cooperation is very effective and successfull – being proofed yesterday, today, and tomorrow. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:16, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
    Chapters, please apply at WMF to be the first of the WMM (Wikimedia Movement). You are dug in by administrating Wikipedia. Get out of your hole: Support free knowledge by structured cooperation to be developed. WMM is facing new frontiers everyday. Please, help to go beyond.
  3. People know much more than what can be quoted from written stuff. Competitors of Wikimedia offer with their systems a better chance for people to interact and cooperate than Wikimedia does. Wikipedia offers no chance to pick-up (controverse) topics and develope a lemma - it has to be “wp:relevant”. Wikimedia should have a look at en:Debategraph. Wikimedia has competence in knowledge. The next step shall be collecting and applying it in cooperative systems – starting with WMM and WMF. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:11, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
  4. Wikipedia is a global role model to create and deliver free knowledge. It can be developed to a global role model how this is done in the best of possible ways: by structured cooperation of an organization and volunteers. --Edward Steintain (talk) 06:08, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
  5. Next to wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/... once there will be wikimediamovement.org/wiki/... (WMF is exposed to competion – generally on a global scale and intraorganizationally with a global community.) Compare Superprotect with Superneglect. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:30, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
  6. Wiki-Idea: Talking to eachother by written words is a repercussion of Babylon. I don´t want this Brave New Wiki-World:ϟ (:ϟ meaning nomark). New online-trends need to feed realty social interactions. Wiki means to be a member of The Movement (WMM) – hand in hand physically: A life beyond electronic visual displays. --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:45, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
  7. Gossip is a cultural intervention that frames the reputaion of an organization – over years. The new signs for cooperation have to be very distinct and convincing. --Edward Steintain (talk)
  8. Software is not softskill (please compare infrastructure). --Edward Steintain (talk) 17:56, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
  9. Solution. Chapters will be made responsible to develope structures to prevent bullying by their acknowledgement „not to look away“. Citation: „... in workplace bullying, the instigators are very often people in positions of organizational leadership, or who have the organizational support of someone in a position of leadership.“[1] Someone might call this a vertical tolerance of now-a-day Wikipedia which was a widely accepted principle 900 to 1.600 years ago by the one´s in power. (Rainer Forst. Toleranz im Konflikt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2003, p. 27-127) --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:07, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
  10. Cooperation could be a fair solution of Some thoughts here and there. Communication is a good start. WMF needs a management for communication by an agreed practice. The principles of communication will be develope by the „Chater of Wikimedia Movement“. Generally WMF is prone to use a structured quality management in detail to promote the wiki-idea of free knowledge. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:12, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
  11. Who ever thinks „You are wrong:ϟ“ (acronym for nomark (dtsch: Neinzeichen)) I tell you: „You are right!“ Decissions in a voluntary system have to be made together to start working together (which can be called a new structured cooperation on-wiki with tolerance - WMM and WMF). My [en:Self-esteem self-esteem] (dtsch: [Selbstwert https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selbstwert] is vanishing participating with Wikipedia. I am one of a million of the WMM (Wikimedia Movement). My wife says: „Forget it! There is no solution in sight and there never shall be one. I would not object if Wikipedia blocks you.“ I love my wife – she became a co-wikipedian - involuntarily, she wants to point out.. I respect her feelings. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:32, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Objections

  1. People – not even WMM ones – have never been taught how to cooperate. It´s a matter beyong binary flatland. I refuse to be binary. I go multinary. --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:11, 26 November 2014 (UTC) To be honest, civilication has no cooperative rules and only very few practical hints how to cooperate – the knowlegde of the world reduces to the state of the art by WMM: Next, we are going for more free knowledge by structured cooperation – that´s the way the world and WMM as a preliminary precursor of the future might not crumble.
  2. Do long-term conbriturors like Aschmidt, Drahreg01, Winternacht, Nemo, and Pizero – and even Lila know what comes after Loss aversion in the end? --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:36, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
  3. Forget it: No trust. WMF makes announcements and does not deliver in time. --Edward Steintain (talk) 18:50, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Problems

  1. WMF-Staff and adminsitrators of the chapters are very much alike. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:56, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
  2. There are fields of never ending struggle with no sulotion in sight. Lucky the ones who leave in time (compare shunning). I am prepared for change – ready to be a wikipedian premigrant on the run, one of a million. --Edward Steintain (talk) 22:50, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
  3. Be bold does not name the adverse effects of Being bold. The recognition of interests of the one´s who are being bold is often hurt. Wikipedia reviewers as Wikipediators have no will (and no structure) to feed an on-going cooperation. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:06, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
  4. WMF has no structured Contributor Complaint Management. WMF has no structured Contributor Relation Management (compare Customer Relation Management (CRM)). WMF lacks of CRM and longs for CRM. Hongkong and San Francisko: The Wiki-idea and others starting with opening frontiers to the future are based organizationaly on structures of the middleages. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:36, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
  5. Over time problems can pile up so the starting point of a conflict cannot be seen any more. --Edward Steintain (talk) 06:26, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
  6. Nobody wants loss. Failures happen but WMF does not react. (comp. Swiss cheese model (deutsch Schweizer-Käse-Modell)). --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:13, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Steps to balance

These are really *great* questions and comments. We are working on the strategy and an update for you sometimes in January and I will incorporate some of these into that update. Much of this is still "on the move" as we shift priorities internally and working through some research. I will also spend some time and give you my thoughts here when I can. -- LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 02:54, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
A quick update on where we stand now, even if it is on a meta level like that all deployment is frozen for the moment, or that there is internal discussion on how to improve discussions with the local communities, and how to better understand their requirements and needs (I think that's the case, but I'm just guessing really) would be very welcome on the main flow page, which according to the page on meta is the page on mediawiki, and according to the page on mediawiki is the page on en.wiki would be very welcome. I've got the feeling good things are happening and the current radio silence is a good thing to normalize things, too long a time might lead some people to believe there is an unpleasant surprise in the works. If that's not the case, and I hope and think it's not, but I've been unpleasantly surprised in the past to keep all options open, keeping everyone posted would help relations IMO. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:13, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
Hi Martijn, fair point. We had to push back the strategy consultation and with the fundraiser it has been a very busy time.
The product team has been drafting a version of the "product development and rollout process" and I have been urging this is made available on wikis ASAP. I am requesting this is done in December so people can see and comment.
We are doing massive amount of "catch-up" on fundamentals, things like understanding basic data (unique visitors, referrals, completion rates) -- basics we should have had years ago, but never instrumented for. There is a lot of change internally and I think the perceived silence is a side-effect of this. We are moving towards quarterly reports, so if there is something specific that you suggest we cover in those, let us know. --LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
I admit, I don't trust the WMF to correctly interpret data. I actually don't trust just about anyone to correctly interpret data, in any soft-sciences context (hard-science data being... slightly less prone to rampant misinterpretation, though there are always folks pushing an agenda who are willing to give it a try). The "lies, damn lies, and statistics" quote is at least as relevant in the second decade of the third millennium as it's ever been. --Pi zero (talk) 00:34, 30 November 2014 (UTC)
It is a challenge and a chance to find out how cooperation on a higher level works sufficiently if we (WMM and WMF) are willing to accept diversity and subsidiarity as major components of cooperation: Balance = Gleichgewicht. If indeed a sophisticated supported process of new cooperation will be started it has to be fair otherwise foot-voting will decided. --Edward Steintain (talk) 08:03, 30 November 2014 (UTC)
1 (one) instant of communication with the communities in over two weeks, that's quite some silence. I really wonder how community input should be believed in, if you decide simply not to communicate with the communities at all. The communities are what matters, the WMF is just the professional organisational entity of the communities. How do you intend to deal with your real bosses in the future? --♫ Sänger - Talk - superputsch must go 11:40, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
That's a bit of a cheap shot IMO. Lila has been communicating here and somewhat on the mailinglists. I don't believe as a ED it's her position to take the lead in communication with the communities; statements from the ED are important in their symbolic value (which I think what's needed right around now), but not in the day to day communications. Listening - and it seems that she's been doing that - is more important IMO. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:53, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
I'd say it is less cheap than you think. It might be true that Executive Director not communicating here is not that big of a problem by itself, but doing so after claiming that it is a priority (Special:Diff/10432105) is a bigger problem. If that's how a priority is being handled, what happens to everything else..? Or do you think she claimed that is a priority when it is not really so? --Martynas Patasius (talk) 19:23, 30 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Lila. Trying to use the time till January 2015 I suggest a Request for Comment trying to find the best possible question to ask for contributions and developements how to induce a higher level of cooperation. The intension is not to name a solution for new cooperating systems but the right and best possible question to find out what the new WMM- and WMF-cooperation could mean and how to achieve it. I think it´s known that the right question(s) has/have to be asked to get on the track of a promissing solution. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:20, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
RfC: What are the improtant questions for the developement of advanced cooperation? Please let us try to use (what I call and what I have applied above) QIOP (the mediation methode of dynamic facilitation). --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:36, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
I think your conceptualization is well taken. Our biggest issue is with scale: at a ration of 200:100,000 or 200:500,000 RfCs are very hard to scale. We are still using a system that worked well in 2005, but in 2014 it is limiting our ability to be inclusive and effective. It would be great to get a system of feedback and contribution that scales better to the size of our user base so we can run many conversations in parallel. I am not sure what it would look like... yet. Ideas welcome. -- LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
(quote) I think your conceptualization is well taken. Our biggest issue is with scale: at a ration of 200:100,000 or 200:500,000 RfCs are very hard to scale.(quote-end)
(just teasing) I think your conceptualization is well taken. Our biggest issue being a member of WWM is with scale (WMF:WWM): at a ration of 20:1,000,000 or 20:5,000,000. RfCs are very hard to scale. Nevertheless - some how the wiki-idea has to get input. WMF can pay for global research too – the scent of groups like Contributors, Wikipediators, Readers, and Supporters – seasoned with a pinch of future. Let´s start cooking and fry the onion first (cooperation within the Chapters - subsidiarity). Lila, are you going to ask the Congress of International Non-Govermental Organisations (CE) and some of its experienced members for support? It´s worth a try to get access to the network. Be brave! --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:48, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
Could you, please, write down what exactly looks wrong to you about RFCs? Without all this "managerese" like "it is limiting our ability to be inclusive and effective" that seems to be mostly meaningless?
Unfortunately, if it is not really meaningless, it reads a bit too much like "We use RFCs and keep getting the answers we do not like. What can we change about that?"... I hope you do understand why even misleading hints of such attitude are not generally adored...
Also, how many RFCs have you actually read? There are different kinds of RFCs. Some are simply discussions, some are mostly votes.
Finally, concerning scale. Let's say every reader of Wikipedia will write a word. Just a word, not a sentence. Even that would be a lot to read. Would you read it? If the answer is "No.", forget about it and be happy that RFCs have less participants. Also, why would the readers participate? What will motivate them? I am pretty sure that should be enough to shut down the most ambitious ideas about changing ways of communication. --Martynas Patasius (talk) 19:49, 30 November 2014 (UTC)
  • @LilaTretikov (WMF): I'm a bit confused about what you actually mean: in "a ratio of 200:100,000", I guess by "200" you mean the number of people contributing to one of the larger RFCs, but what's the 100,000? The number of users who would have something interesting to say if we knew how to ask them? What system has a problem with the size of the user base? And by users, do you mean readers or editors? Are there not millions of conversations running in parallel on all the projects right now?
    I'd be happy to try coming up with one or the other idea, but for the qestion at hand here, my best answer would be "42" ;-) — HHHIPPO 23:07, 30 November 2014 (UTC)
Please compare Questions, Nr. 4. --Edward Steintain (talk) 06:46, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
The turnout of the German RFC on the superprotect flag was actually 800... ---<(kmk)>- (talk) 00:08, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
Of course, You must weight the ratio. The action of one can have the weight of 100.000. On the other side, 800 is only the number of the complete active community on de:wp with more than 100 edits/month, a "few hundred", which have the weight of zero, because they have to be changed anyway. The only thing, that will surely never change, is that kind of thinking here. --Magiers (talk) 15:51, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia on stage: „The Play of History“. Please support the developement of cooperation and tolerance naming existing on-wiki links of seeds to grow. That is what wikipedia will be tomorrow. Try to keep me to be a member of the WMM. WMF and WMM have to work very hard to convince me of not to I Don't Play any more:ϟ (as many did before). Cooperation and tolerance of wikipedia is unstructured; this is wikipedia as an organization loosing (z. B. mich (engl. me)). --Edward Steintain (talk) 22:01, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
In fakt one possibility to get out of a dilemma is DON'T PLAY (Gordon Tullock, Adam Smith and the Prisoners' Dilemma, 1985) Wikipedia has quite some experience with. Albert O. Hirschman calls it Exit, (1970) --Edward Steintain (talk) 08:27, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
Lila´s team is kindly asked to prevent automatic (bot) archival of the given thread and apply „Do not archive until ...“ which could be February 14th, 2015 – Valentine's Day.
There were many outstanding proposals and profound complaints on Lila's talk page which pointed towards a new possible direction for WMM and WMF. I have tried to condence very many useful comments and your honest feelings as a contributer written so often and sometimes saying: This is not right:ϟ . Everybody has a right to say NO:ϟ (and mark it when and where ever you want. This can be counted on the internet (or YES! or I don't know?) and could give useful impulses. – I have introduced my suggestions to take steps towards future which are only a tiny part of the rightous interests of millions partcipating as an international community of individual volunteers (iCIV).
This is Wikipedia with a potentionally brilliant outlook providing free knowledge with an advanced level of Cooperation and Tolerance. We are talking about software which is only the organizational hardware of WMM and WMF in working together. This Hardware and WP-structure are perfect excisting hard-skills to develope new soft-skills like cooperation and tolerance, I am suggesting to the Wikimedia Movement (WMM) and Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Have fun to consider it or discussing it and get hopeful. Loving seasonal greetings. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:55, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Not sure I am allowed to ask this, but I will do so anyways: if at all possible to maintain a summary of ideas for each section, that would help me enormously with responding and also for staff to address. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 20:36, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

Summary with an open end: The wiki-idea is part of future

Working together of Wikipedia Movement (WMM) and Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is a principle of cooperation once we know about. Cooperation is useful to develope the wiki-idea which is young and has only started. Some following steps will follow. They shall be:

How do you see this working in practice? "next organized step of the four cardinal virtues shall be Justice acquired by something like Community organization" LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Lila, service! --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:13, 1 July 2015 (UTC)
Lila, stop thinking. Mindfulness is to listen and serve. --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:26, 1 July 2015 (UTC)
Methode of Community Organizing: I suggest to ask the contritutors at the village pump to name as a group two (condenced) major topics which are collected at a central public site and then processed further to a suggestion of a common will. This will take about one year. German speaking Wikipedians chould have a look at the recommendable Handbuch Community Organizing, Theorie und Praxis in Deutschland, Forum für Community Organizing e.V. FOCO · Stiftung Mitarbeit (Hrsg.) in Kooperation mit DICO · Arbeitshilfen für Selbsthilfe- und Bürgerinitiativen Nr. 46 · Verlag Stiftung Mitarbeit · Bonn · 2014 2. Auflage · 248 S. · ISBN 978-3-941143-15-9  · 12,00 € . WMF could ask comparable US organisations for support. Some things do not have to be invented again. Does this help? --Edward Steintain (talk)

Good Luck, --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:16, 9 December 2014 (UTC) What shall we discuss about in 2016 or one year later after finishing this job of cooperation and tolerance?

Self-efficacy (WMM)

Self-esteem is a part freedom (Mill). What is the WMF-understanding of (percieved) Self-efficacy – which could lead to cooperation? --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:56, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

31 – 31 devided by 3 is the Conflict of All Problems. (comp. Adiaphora) --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:45, 15 January 2015 (UTC)
WMF has to coordinate (matching working together) two moral precepts: Guardian Syndrome and Commerce Syndrome (Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs to serve the perceived self-efficacy of each individual (diversity of iCIV / WMM). This might be a basic rule for cooperation and tolerance in the Charter of WMM. --Edward Steintain (talk) 10:09, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
Once this was called Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, I suggest as a topic to be discussed in Charter of WMM. --Edward Steintain (talk)
I think you bring up some great points above Edward and I share a lot of your sentiments about the decline of Wiki culture and the distrust of the WMF and their failure to do anything about these problems. They occassionally comment and tell people what they think they want to hear like "we look forward to working with the community" or "we are working on that" but its really just smoke. They make almost zero effort to work with the community and instead only talk to lie minded people who want to work for the WMF and don't want to change anything while dismissing things they don't want to talk about. Admin abuse is a huge problem and so are retention, bullying and an increase in drama. Even the comments here from Lila are unfortunately more along the lines of I her ya, here is a comment to make you feel better and back to what I was doing. Reguyla (talk) 19:15, 12 April 2015 (UTC)
Reguyla, you probably meant "like minded" rather than "lie minded". A Freudian slip, perhaps? Unless it wasn't a slip.
In fairness, some members of the community may have placed unrealistic hopes in Lila being a force for change in the WMF. She's a newcomer carefully selected by, ultimately, the people responsible for the current problem policies of the Foundation. I did listen to her Wikimania address; my quick summary of it: (1) the non-Wikipedian sister projects are to be ignored by the Foundation; (2) the Foundation must be innovative; and (3) innovation by the Foundation means doing more of the same things they've been doing for years.
Part of the difficulty with the whole "innovation" thing is that the Foundation seems not to have realized the wikimedian sisterhood of projects are inherently innovative, because of the features of those projects that the Foundation is working most vigorously to undo. The idea of serious information-providing driven by the general population is just so radical it can't easily be grokked by the sort of people naturally attracted to a centralized organization like the Foundation. All the biggest and most (to be blunt) counterproductive initiatives by the Foundation have been about centralizing control and power, which is exactly why they've been counterproductive. --Pi zero (talk) 12:06, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, your absolutely correct I did mean to say like minded. That was a typo and I apologize for incorrect inferences. I also agree that Lila is unlikely to change much and I also agree that the WMF is neither innovative nor are they eager to hear about anything that would disturb the status quo. I also agree that a lot of focus seems to be on the WMF exerting control in areas they shouldn't while avoiding completely areas they should. The superprotect initiative is a prime example as are the centralization of accounts which are angering people cross wiki. Why should someone have to abandon an account name they have used for years because a blocked vandal copies it and Joe Jobbed them on another. Someone with 200, 000 edits should not have to cater to some vandal who did 10 edits and was blocked. That is the ultimate reward for a vandal or sockmaster, to exert that type of change on someone they don't like. Now I am generally supportive of the centralized account, but because the WMF waited so long to do it, its creating just as many, if not more problems, than its fixing. There are literally dozens of examples where the WMF should be doing stuff and doesn't want too or where they are doing stuff the community doesn't want or need. Unfortunately at the end of the day it seems like Lila is more of a pretty face to put in front of the organization than someone in control of it. Reguyla (talk) 13:51, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
Hi all -- I think you may have misunderstood me re: innovation. I did say that WMF needs to be innovative, but I did not mean that all innovation should come from the WMF. In fact, I believe most innovative projects came out -- and will continue to come -- from the community. What we need to do at the WMF is to better spot and support those, including providing guidance around how to scale them. Traditionally we have indeed ignored everything but Wikipedia and I believe we could have amplified both Wikipedia and other key projects (ex. Dictionary, Data, Source) if we better integrated our thinking. Knowledge comes in many forms. To you point re: doing things we need to do -- part of the issue is actually hearing those things. The new Community Engagement team is working to set up ways to hear what our communities need and respond to those needs. I expect the "response team" will be put together in the ~90 days. Finally, change takes time, especially at our history and scale. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 16:50, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
That's great news. But with respect the old team "heard" the community too, they just chose to either ignore what the community was saying or didn't ask for the communities input in areas where they felt some discussion could lead to not doing what they wanted to do. So IMO what we need is not a group who's job it is to "hear" the community, they should be actively working with the community. There are a lot of smart and helpful people in the projects and I believe if the WMF is willing to work with them rather than at them the results would be so much better. Also, the WMF is fragmented so just hearing the community isn't going to be of much use unless the other sections of the WMF are engaged as well. If the technical section just does whatever they want, as they have in the past without regard to the communities input then there is no reason to setup the community engagement team in the first place. Its just paving a cowpath and won't change anything other than add another layer of bureaucracy to an already over complicated process. There needs to be a way of tracking the discussions and the solutions as noted above. There needs to be a hierarchy of checks and balances rather than the system currently in place where a few on one project can abusively do whatever they want and claim a consensus. Reguyla (talk) 17:04, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
I have to say, after reading this about Erik Mohler resigning I feel like Lila may actually be doing some good. I know a lot of people like him and Jorm, but both really were doing more to hold the project back than to move it forward and I personally think this will be a massive improvement for the WMF. Of course time will tell depending on who the replacement is because sometimes its better to stick with the devil you know, but this has the earmarks of being an improvement. So I retract at least part of my statement about Lila not appearing to do much from a leadership standpoint. Of course there are several others that I think should go as well, but this is a good start. Reguyla (talk) 15:03, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
Lila, it does seem you may be looking in some helpful directions, but I suspect (also, am concerned) you may be overestimating how new your approach is, and underestimating the scope of problems with Foundation strategy. It is of course hard for us to tell what's really going on behind the scenes until-and-unless it has visible results (at which point if misdirected it may be too late to do anything about). I observe that the call to action thing is disturbingly central-control-oriented; there's nothing in it to suggest any real change in direction, rather it appears to favor continuing to make various mistakes the Foundation has made in recent years. I'm slowly coming to appreciate (guess I'm just slow) that the Foundation itself is a single point of failure for the sisterhood. For wikis, which by their nature should be as distributed as possible, SPOFs do occur but one should look for some way to amend infrastructure to eliminate them. How that could be done in this case, so far I don't know. --Pi zero (talk) 17:29, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
There are a few points you are making:
  1. do we have a new approach? It is not as much about the novelty as it is about our ability to make it work.
  2. are we doing to much? We are a 200 person organization trying measuring up to wall street giants. We are definitely doing too much. This year we have been actively pruning what we do. Examples of some of the projects that were put on hold are WikiGrok (in favor of Community Tech) and Collections.
  3. are we central control oriented? We are a hub, linking many things: organizations around the world, projects and volunteers. In a cense we are central.
  4. is call to action a change? I believe it is. It is focused on two of our core fundamentals: community and tech. It asks us to fix some log-lingering problems vs. trying to do something shiny and new. In those two ways it provides important and different focus for the WMF.
  5. will we make mistakes? If we are not making mistakes, we are not learning and improving. We set clear priorities to minimize any impact to our current editing community as a success criteria, which should help us reduce the error rate. The key is not repeating mistakes and to improve at every step. I ask that there is understanding that we are working closely with our communities to identify where to improve (like with revscore) and some patience as we make these improvements.
  6. visible results are what it is about. Agreed,
LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 22 July 2015 (UTC)
Lila, a few points:
  • Re "not as much about the novelty as it is about your ability to make it work" — This is worrisome. If you're trying to go in the wrong direction, the situation won't be helped by becoming more effective at going in the direction you're trying to go in.
  • Re "We are a 200 person organization trying measuring up to wall street giants" — WMF should not be trying to compete with big corporations. This isn't the first time, as I recall, you've depicted the WMF as in competition with big corporations, and that indicates a mistaken perception of what the WMF should be doing.
  • Re "We are a hub" — WMF should not be trying to control the sisters. It blatantly is doing so, for if it weren't doing so there would be no superprotect. As I'm fairly sure I've remarked around here at some point, the more the Foundation tries to "improve" things, the more it damages the thing it's trying to nurture. Fundamentally this is because the volunteers are not doing it for the Foundation, they're doing it for the vision of an information source by and for the people. Every time the WMF makes itself visible it makes volunteering look less like contributing to a grass-roots community and more like donating free labor to a business. Cf. the earlier remark about not competing with big corporations.
  • Re "visible results are what it is about" — I think you've missed my point. I was commenting on the lack of visibility, and how it helps the WMF to continue to make mistakes.
  • Re "If we are not making mistakes, we are not learning and improving" — For this remark to come out well, the WMF would have to have a good reputation for learning from its mistakes. That's not its reputation. If you'd taken my advice nearly a year ago, and immediately removed superproect from the software with an unconditional apology, you could have gotten positive momentum toward such a reputation.
--Pi zero (talk) 12:15, 26 July 2015 (UTC)
Pi zero and Reguyla, Lila might not know Godman´s four apocalyptic riders [5]. One of them is justification, an ancient WMF-habit going on since years. Lila and her precursor did not get any advice by a mediator. Members of iCIV contributing to Lila´s WMF-user-page are playing CHICKEN riding a bicycle while WMF is driving a SUV. Pi zero and Reguyla, please answer on the Aug. 10, I shall reply on Aug. 20 – this is an attempt of an anti-bot-strategy: Please, keep this thread going on till Lila Tretikov will apply or suggest concepts of mediation. Thanks, --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:04, 30 July 2015 (UTC)
I think there are more constructive ways of managing this talk page than the contortions you suggest. And I'm not sure who are the parties to your proposed mediation. But it is interesting that you mention Gottman's four conditions, two of which are stonewalling and contempt: that reflects my comment below under #Non-engagement. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:49, 30 July 2015 (UTC)
Hi Edward,
This year we took the time to build the model around how to manage the cycle of what your diagram shows as process with the goal of improving collaboration and alignment. We tested many different ideas: some we have actioned, others we not as successful. Our draft process is somewhat similar to your cycle above and includes idea gathering (we did this as part of strategy consultation, for example), strategy update (with informational sessions), Call to Action (18-month horizon goals), Annual plan, Quarterly Objectives, and open prioritization meeting (piloted with VE). What we are doing now is turning this into an operational framework that we will open to everyone for participation. It will show when and how to engage to create mutual alignment, focused on our objective to engage every human with knowledge. Throughout this process there will be touch points from informational to partnership. I can give many examples of each as we do them today. But more importantly there needs to be a well understood and anticipated cycle for this engagement.LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 22:14, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

Non-engagement

Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion

Lila, I for one am beginning to run out of patience with the attitude that certain members of your staff display towards the volunteer community. As has been discussed on your talk page, there are projects in which the community has been actively involved, on which no progress has been made, for which deadline and timelines have been comprehensively broken, and which in some cases the WMF staff responsible now simply refuse to discuss further. One new community-facing department is apparently hard at work but refuses, in spite of repeated requests, to communicate anything at all to the community which has already started work in preparation. I cannot accept that this is due to pressure of work. It simply defies belief that there is nobody among these teams who can take even one minute in a month or so to post a simple acknowledgement, and another five minutes to say when if at all, they will be able to respond in greater detail. It cannot be true, and it is not true. The attitude displayed is simply one of contempt to the community who provide, for free, the content that inspires donors to provide the money that pays their salaries. I have said before this attitude of determined non-communication is an insult to the community, and is corroding further the relationship between staff and volunteers, which you cannot afford to have happen.

Please consider as a matter of urgency what you can do to explain to your staff in clear terms that you find this attitude of contempt for the community intolerable, and demonstrate with clear action that you are not tolerating it. If you disagree, and think the situation I describe is tolerable, and that you will tolerate it further, then please have the frankness to say so to me and the community. Again, I ask you to act, and act now, in the interests of the whole movement. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:32, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

To be completely fair, I should say that after I made this post, the team in question took the step of publishing their names at mediawiki [6]. So it is no longer correct to say that they have refused to communicate at all: they have gone so far as to tell us what we knew already. I do not know whether that was a result of my post here, but I imagine you do no want to run the WMF in a way which requires an intervention on your talk page every time the community needs some information from your staff (I do not say "need" lightly -- this is a community-facing team with a backlog of engagement with the community which can only be handled effectively and efficiently if the paid staff help the volunteers to help them, by indicating among other things the nature and scope of the work they are going to address.) Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:42, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
First, being respectful in communication is absolutely a requirement for anyone on the WMF staff, including myself; it is non-negotiable. Second, if we are talking about the emerging community tech, it is very very new. Please have patience, they are just learning and putting together their program. You can expect to hear more from them in the next few weeks. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately, this does not address my point. There is a pattern of non-communication, after repeated polite reuqests for information: I say pattern because I referred to four examples, all of which have been mentioned here. There are three community engagement projects for which results or further action was expected by certain dates: those dates have passed, the expected actions have not materialised, no explanation has been given and requests for explanation or new timelines have been ignored. This is not respectful.
You say that respect is not negotiable. Unfortunately, that is exactly what it is. Your Senior Director of Community Engagement has on his talk page right now a literal negotiation in which he explains that he accepts that failure to acknowledge (not answer, acknowledge) messages may be seen as rude but he has more important things to do -- "unable to actually get much work done" -- and asks for suggestions. I may say that I offered him some, constructive of course, for managing his talk page, similar what I have suggested here to you. Unfortunately he seems to be again too busy to acknowledge that, although he did have time later to acknowledge a more frivolous message. So, respect apparently is negotiable, and t seems that I for one am not too good at negotiating it with your senior staff.
In the specific case you mention, the team was announced in April, a specific staff member was named as "incubator" and two contractors were named as team members. From May to July, that's three months, there were repeated requests for the incubator in person and members of the team to engage with the community, which had already begun work on here on Meta ready for the engagement, there was no visible engagement by the team with the community at Meta, no response at all to personal messages for the incubator, no engagement with the community's work and no guidance for that work to optimise its effectiveness. So that lack of communication has been having a practical, and negative, effect, on the work being done in the community. This team is not "very very new", it is three months old.
So please mandate an engagement that is real, open and constructive; tell your senior staff to be role models for the sort of behaviours you want; bear down on ineffective behaviours where you find them, and please help the community to help you achieve our common goals. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:44, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
I agree and I would add that the engagement needs to be collaborative, not the WMF "engaging" the communities that work hard to maintain the projects by telling them they don't have time. There needs to be open lines of communication between the WMF and the community and dare I say it, talk pages on a Wiki is probably not the best way to do that. That also doesn't mean offline forms of communication like Skype. It needs to be visible and transparent not off record and off the books where the WMF can simply ignore it. Reguyla (talk) 19:09, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
  • Lila, I would add that what is required is a culture change and I believe that you agree with me as far as that goes. Changing the organisation's culture isn't easy, and it has to be driven as much from above as it is from below. You and your leaders need to model the behaviours you want. I won't say "C-level" since apparently nobody knows what that means, and anyway your leadership includes the technical and thought leaders within your staff -- those who command credibility by reason of their expertise and accomplishments rather than by having a specific place within your management structure. All of these people need to be on side with the changes you want. It so happens that you are currently suffering a shortage of senior staff (in the organisational sense) and so it's even more important that there is consistency and credibility in your role models.
I think it's unfortunate that you yourself have chosen to be out of the office so much in recent weeks, and so unable to reinforce the behaviours you want by direct personal intervention. I really think you need to be back in the office a lot now. It would be great for the UK movement if, for example, you were able to come to the London Science Conference (2-3 September) and if you do, we can discuss these points at length over a cup of coffee and I can try to persuade you to open a branch office in London, but I have to admit in all modesty that that would be a much less valuable use of your time than being in the office.
Consider whether your engagement with the non-SF elements of the movement -- and I'm not disputing the importance of such personal contacts -- can be carried out by other people. For example, are you making enough use of your Board to represent the Foundation at events? Would it be more valuable to send a more junior member of staff to speak on a specific, specialist topic of direct focussed interest to a specific group, than for you use your time to repeat the high-level summary you gave in Mexico, inspiring though it no doubt was.
While you are away, or even while you're in the office, use your staff to triage your talk page and direct messages to the people who can deal with them -- and then quiz the recipients to make sure that interactions are dealt with effectively, holding the staff to account for the way they have handled them. Have your seniors do the same. Trust the community and let them help you. Please. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:38, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
Out-of-the-office means out meeting with volunteers and Wikimedia organizations and their events. Which seems to be exactly what you are asking for. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 04:50, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Indeed it does and I was suggesting ways that you might share the burden of that particular mode of engagement with others while your time can be more valuably spent in the office driving the organisational changes you want and which I suggest requires your personal input. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:20, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
@Rogol Domedonfors: Left some info for you at mw:Talk:Community Tech team. Kaldari (talk) 00:30, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. Perhaps I should emphasise, though, that that information is not for me, but for the benefit of the community as a whole. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 18:31, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Communications suggestion

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Lila, I'm going to try to pick up a theme from topics above as well as from the Annual Plan talk page and Luis' talk page.

It is sometimes very difficult to get coherent and timely answers from WMF in response to community questions and concerns. It seems to me that it shouldn't be necessary for volunteers to come to your talk page in order to move the process along. I would like to suggest that WMF and the community would both benefit from more responsive communication without necessarily taking time away from you, Luis, or other C-level staff. It seems reasonable to me that a "saved" FTE from the section above could be re-purposed into a "Community communications liaison" role. This person would be responsible for responding to community inquiries about WMF issues in a timely manner. What would you think about that suggestion?

Thanks, --Pine✉ 06:18, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes we will consider this role. Thank you. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Yet another survey

Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

Lila, it seems that the WMF is about to embark on yet another survey -- the Grants:Evaluation/Community Health learning campaign. In spite of your comments here last April [7] when referring to yet another survey that had not (and still has not) reported, It did not have an expected outcome and a timeline (which projects should have) this latest survey appears to have exactly the same flaws. It is not stated who is going to use the results of this survey, what they are going to be used for, how and when. Can I suggest in the strongest possible terms that WMF should not embark on yet another survey while there are three surveys outstanding for which results have been promised but not yet shown to the community. (I would have made these comments to the Community Engagement team but, as noted above, the head of that department is currently too busy to acknowledge my messages.) It is further disturbing that this latest "campaign" comes under the heading of Grants. Does this mean that someone somewhere has been given a sum of money to carry it out? If so, it is not in the slightest transparent who has that money, what the grant proposal was, how it was assessed or what the success criteria are. May I suggest that you need to find out what is going on here and take an executive decision as whether this new survey is the right thing for your staff to be doing at a time when they have so much work to do that they are unable to process the results of three previous surveys. (My personal suggestion is that you cancel it immediately before it wastes more volunteer time and donor money, but of course the decision is yours.) Please ensure that somebody, somewhere explain to you and to the community exactly what they think they are trying to achieve here. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 16:55, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Please note that not all messages can get an answer from staff (they never did in the past and while we increased capacity we cannot address all). We have SLAs for different workflows (like OTRS support) that absolutely require attention. Also active volunteers that are working on specific projects will inevitably get priority as is typical in all open source projects: action speaks. If you are sending questions or suggestions they may or may not get a direct response. There is no SLA on those types of messages. In terms of surveys, the surveys you are listing are learning about different issues and are managed by different teams. Healthy community communication is very different than a discussion on how we manage product. Again, some may not end up with a "summary" but this does not mean we do not learn from them. For example, VE rollout took and implemented may notes from the product process discussion and the new Community Tech team is using the experimental tools survey to prioritize their upcoming work. Thanks! LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 05:11, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Lila, you write If you are sending questions or suggestions they may or may not get a direct response. This is exactly the point I was making above under #Non-engagement, but it is refreshing to have it out in the open. You wrote there that respect is non-negotiable. My position is that deliberately ignoring messages and refusing to even acknowledge well-meant constructive suggestions or answer legitimate questions about non-performance of promised actions is disrespectful, and that there is something wrong in a culture that encourages that. But you now say are prepared to tolerate it too, although I am glad to say that you personally are far more willing to engage with the community than some of your staff who are paid to do so, and I applaud you for it. Even framing it in terms of Service Level Agreements misses the point. Staff and community are supposed to be working together on this: they should not be in an adversarial relationship, although sadly too often they are. My position continues to be that relations between the staff and the community will not be as productive as you want and need until you change that policy. Speaking purely personally, I have to say this attitude of disrespect on the part of some of your staff makes me positively angry. The behaviour of some of your staff is insulting, it is, I believe, intended to be insulting, and I have been asking you to do something about it: I now understand that you will not.
You stated that previous surveys results have been valuable. Then why did your staff not say so. Various reports back to the community were promised, asked for repeatedly, and have still not materialised. Requests for updates on progress have been met with vague expectations of future action, and subsequent requests have been ignored. If the fact of the matter is that it has been decided not to publish those reports then why not say so. It would take about 5 minutes to post a statement saying "We have decided not to post a formal report after all: we apologise for that. The results have been assessed internally and have proved a valuable input to (whatever) plan. Thanks you to everyone who took part for your time and effort which has been very helpful." That would have closed off the loop and allowed everyone to move on to the next thing. I am old-fashioned enough to think that apologising for not doing what you said you would do, and thanking people for their effort never comes amiss.
Now let me turn to the questions I actually asked. Who is running this ltest survey, what is it for, when will it finish, what will happen as a result and when will the results be published? How large a grant was given, to whom, and on what criteria? These are all questions that you did not answer, and the answers to which are not public. I hope they were addressed before it started. If so, then please have the answers made public. If hose questions have never been addressed, this survey will fail and be a waste of time and money. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:48, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Along the same theme of unfulfilled expectations, above on 25 July you said that you would ask your Director of the Editing team to respond here. When you ask an employee to do something, do you consider their response optional, or have a timeframe in mind for their response to be considered timely? Noting that the Director of Editing, if I'm reading the online org chart correctly, hasn't edited on this Wiki since 26 May 2012, I'm looking forward to their return to give a response. Wbm1058 (talk) 15:42, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
I gotta agree with the comments above. If the WMF hasn't even finished the last survey then why are we doing another one? Also, what is the goal? Are we just asking for the sake of asking or is there some finite question we are using the data to answer? I just don't see the answers to these questions in the survey link above. Reguyla (talk) 17:32, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi all, thank you for sharing your impressions in this space. We apologize for sending the message in English. We realize MassMessage is not a good tool for this, and are considering developing better tools for sending localized messages. We have also seen some disagreement on the campaign’s page about the content not being translated in advance. We want to encourage everyone to contribute your views in any language you may prefer, as some of you have already done. The campaign is open to be translated in any language, and we encourage to add your language as well, as it may help people in your community contribute until August 23.

We are happy to say a little more about the motivations of the campaign. Understanding what makes our communities grow and thrive is an important issue across communities and we want to engage in conversation with as many editors, new or experienced, as possible. We started the conversation in a collaborative mural at Wikimania and will be capturing and sorting the input submitted in both words and images through the month of September. Drawings as a qualitative research tools can provide insight into complex social challenges and we want to provide drawings as one tool for community members to describe a healthy community via words or images [1].

What’s next? We appreciate your feedback so far, and you can continue to have this conversation here or on the campaign pages. All input will feed into a map of themes that will help Learning and Evaluation build a practical guide on how to better collaborate and talk online in different communities. Thank you for joining the conversation. MCruz (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

References
  1. ↑ Drawing as a Qualitative Research Tool. An approach to fieldwork from a social complexity perspective by Christina Zweifel and Joris Van Wezemael, on TRACEY, journal of drawing and visualization research, May 2012
Thank you for that, but none of this explains why this exercise is needed. It seems that it is not a survey, since you hav no idea of the population size and hence no way of assessing whether the results are statistically significant. It is not a discussion, or conversation in any real sense, since there is no interaction or dialogue, and there is no plan to summarise the results and feed them back to the participants or the community. It is not objective, since it is framed as a competition in which one of the rules No Submission shall portray Sponsor in a negative light. appears to explicitly exclude criticism of the Foundation. It is an exercise in getting some ideas which might inform some unspeified thinking at some unspecified future time in some unspecified way if some unspecified interesting thing crops up. Well, there is a huge backlog of ideas that might inform WMF thinking already if that's all you wnt to do. I have listed several locations in a discussion at Talk:Community Engagement (Product)/Wikimania 2015, for example, and there are numerous others. Before consuming yet more volunteer time and donor money in gathering yet more input, can you assure Lila (not me) that you have adequately processed all the input that has already been provided to you by the community, and demonstrate both to her and to the community the results of that processing? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:02, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Respect

Latest comment: 9 years ago30 comments8 people in discussion

Lila, you say that respect is nonnegotiable. Do you mean that to be a one-way street? That is, do you only intend to require that we (volunteers) have to respect you (representatives of the Foundation)? Because you also say that results are what matters, and observable results indicate that you (again, that's collective "you") simply do not respect us.

Respect is a two way street. I meant to say that it is non-negotiable that WMF staff treats our contributors and users with professionalism and respect in any interaction. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
It is clear that your ideas of professionalism and respect differ from mine, and probably from those of other contributors. I would like to think we can resolve this discrepancy -- is there any way forward? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 18:47, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

To illustrate the point, here's how my wikimedian day has gone, thus far. First, as I monitor a number of sister projects that I don't usually contribute to, I noted that the Topic namespace of English Wikiversity is broken. A whole section of their project disabled. How did this happen? Apparently, somebody created a Topic namespace on all projects in order to support Flow, without asking the permission of local projects or even checking to see whether the local projects already had a namespace with that name. Since it's clear lots of projects don't want Flow, and you've said it won't be imposed on any project that doesn't want it, what do you expect us to think about this? Pessimistically but reasonably, one might suppose that you're simply saying things to us without regard to whether they're true, in order to keep us sufficiently placated until the next time you're ready to betray our trust. It would actually be more optimistic to suppose the change was made with an authentic lack of regard for the local projects.

This is likely an error, I will send this to the team to identify the flaw in what happened and to ensure this will not happen again. Please, please don't interpret mistakes as malicious intent. Let's assume good faith. All Flow enablements have been on per community request *only*. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
Lila, it seems to be going fine, given that it happened in the first place. The community and the devs are working together, afaics. I never imagined there was any malice involved. What there is, is a system in which centralized control is being promoted (unwisely) and is making such non-malicious problems likely to occur. The specific problem is a symptom of how ill-advised the centralized approach is in the first place. Note, this is not something that can be fixed by telling the employees to be respectful, because the lack of respect is built into what they're being told to do. I doubt you would consider yourself to not respect the volunteers — but the agenda you're pursuing is inherently centralized, in a way that is inherently disrespectful of the volunteers, and everyone at the Foundation who's wrapped up in that agenda is unavoidably wrapped up in that lack of respect. Nor, btw, can you fix the problem with centralization merely by improving the lines of communication between the devs and the volunteers, because the whole structure of the situation requires the devs to make detailed decisions that should be part of what the contributors to the wiki do. Making complicated, sophisticated software is antithetical to the nature of wikis. The primitivity of wiki technology is not a disadvantage of wikis, it's a necessary part of why they've succeeded. --Pi zero (talk) 21:09, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

That didn't directly affect me since, as I said, I don't usually contribute to English Wikiversity. However, I do contribute to English Wikinews. And I discovered this morning that a bot had just made several hundred unauthorized edits to the project. English Wikinews has a long-standing policy that bots are not to be operated at all on the project until after getting prior approval from the community. And even if we give a bot permission to operate, we don't necessarily grant it the bot flag. Thanks to the various centralization moves made in recent years by the Foundation, however, this bot was able to make a big pile of unauthorized edits, with the bot flag (which causes auto-sighting, something we've turned off even for authorized reviewers) because the bot flag has been taken out of local control for global bots. Moreover, the purpose of the bot is to systematically make edits that English Wikinews has decided not to make: it was removing local interwiki markup for pages that have interwikis now being generated by Wikidata. I'll not bother to list the reasons for not removing local interwikis (no need for an essay atm on why Wikidata is inherently unsuited to replace them); the point is that English Wikinews had made that decision. In fact, local projects are supposed to have the power to override Wikidata-generated interwikis, and here we have a global bot operating essentially by stealth to remove local safeguards. I spent all morning cleaning up the mess it had created. I suppose, as a diligent English Wikinews admin, I should also go find a list of all such global bots and put English Wikinews blocks on all the ones that haven't been locally authorized (and in some cases also nominate them for local permission) — but I'm going to be hard pressed to find time to do that because we're a news site and I have to get back to actual news production after all the time I've spent today cleaning up the mess created by the Foundation's lack of respect for local projects. To be clear: the problem here isn't merely the particular bot; it's that all the fundamentally locally-disrespectful centralization moves made by the Foundation have acted in concert to make this sort of damage likely.


You can require us to act, superficially, as if we respect you. But if you treat us like dirt, you can't really expect we're going to respect you — we might respect (in the sense of being cautious) your ability to undermine or outright destroy our efforts, but if your actions demonstrate that you actually don't respect us, you should expect us to think of you as a problem to be worked around. --Pi zero (talk) 18:25, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

I think part of the issue is that the foundation is being requested to address things that are not under the foundations control but under community control. While each project is given a fair bit of anonymity they are not given complete anonymity.
With respect to the bot issue, was it a foundation run bot or a community member run bot? It is a meta community decision to have global bots not a foundation one from my understanding.
With respect to flow we all do stuff that breaks other stuff from time to time. We just need to make sure that it is reversible and fix it when the problem occurs. Have you forwarded the flow issue to the person who caused it? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:45, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
Did you mean anonymity or autonomy here? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 18:34, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
Global bots are a meta issue, of course. English Wikinews has a global bot policy that says global bots don't need local permission to "maintain" interwikis; the problem is that English Wikinews does not consider deleting local interwiki markup in favor of Wikidata-generated interwikis to be "maintaining" interwikis. Behind this is the evident expectation, when Wikinews adopted its global bot policy, that the meta community that manage global bots wouldn't go crazy. (Tbh, I find it quite, er, ill-conceived to try to use Wikidata to replace local interwikis, which is realistically what is being attempted; setting aside the inherent vandlism/accident-proneness of the Wikidata approach, Wikidata's infrastructure systematically excludes some interwikis even from Wikipedia, despite Wikidata's Wikipedia-centrism.)

I honestly can't afford to get caught up in Wikiversity's problems (Wikinews's problems are more than enough); I only note them as an example of the general point I'm making about respect. That point stands. It all comes down to widespread moves toward centralization that consistently damage local control and therefore local morale. It's a long-term recipe for discouraging local contribution; hopefully the Foundation doesn't intend to discourage local contribution, but they do so anyway. Tbh, Wikinews is used to being disrespected, having been on the receiving end of that treatment for many years; it's the open moves against Wikipedia that are surprising. --Pi zero (talk) 17:08, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

But how is the first concern WRT the bot the fault of the foundation? And would hope that those at WV are working with whoever caused the problem to fix it. I do not see the examples you give as supports disrespect of Lila towards the community. What "open moves against Wikipedia" do you refer to? If you are referring to Wikidata, I personally find it useful, especially for work / data collection between 100s of languages. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:49, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I hope to get back to much of that when I have more time (I have about two minutes atm). But I should correct one misapprehension immediately: I never ascribed disrespect specifically to Lila. On the contrary, I went out of my way to repeatedly emphasize the plural/collective nature of the pronoun. The problem belongs to the Foundation as a whole. --Pi zero (talk) 02:03, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I would; however, argue that the WMF like the community is not a single entity but a collection of individuals. And thus does not speak / act with a unified intent. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:14, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
An interesting view of the WMF but rather disturbing if true. I am sure, Lila, that you see it differently? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 11:16, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
Per my comment here I doubt there was universal consensus at the WMF that superprotect was a good idea. Corporations generally do not have universal consensus within them any more than communities of volunteers. They just more often present decisions like they have one. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:08, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
True, but I find it rather interesting that the WMF didn't even both to mention to the community at all that it was planning to make these changes. I presume they didn't just wake up one day and do them, some planning must have gone into it first. So it would have been appropriate for the WMF to at least drop a note on the project and say on X date this is going to happen and go to Y and tell us if you do not agree. The WMF has repeatedly refused to take action on a lot of issues that are far more serious to the communities than a few edits like the ones mentioned about. One example is some sort of review process to review the conduct of admins and functionaries outside the project and with unbiased review. Problematic admins are a staple of ENWP. Hardly a day doesn't go by when they are mentioned at least indirectly and often times names are brought out specifically. The arbcom occasionally demotes a few admins after long debates but more often than not they dismiss the cases due not because the desysop request had no merit, but because it was out of process. In other words, the appropriate red tape hadn't been cut and the TPS reports didn't have the correct cover page. So, because someone didn't understand the finite and specific rules of Arbcom filings, a problematic admin was released to do more damage to the project. The community shouldn't even need to discuss cases like the one with Chase Me ladies or a lot of others where there were major known problems with the admin. That's just one example. Even then there needs to be a documented policy of doing it. If the WMF wants to act, then they should do so the right way for the right reasons and with the right methodology and procedure, not just willy nilly whenever they feel like usurping the communities. Reguyla (talk) 21:29, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I have never seen En WP request for the WMF to "review the conduct of admins and functionaries outside the project" and demote the ones where their are issues. The few times global blocks have been used by the WMF has been controversial enough. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:48, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
I don't know if ENWP has ever "requested" that but its something that the WMF should do as part of their mission to maintain the projects. Many of the project like ENWP have a long history of abusive conduct within the admin communities and oftentimes such as the case of ENWP that conduct is justified and or suppressed by other admins. Not the least of which is the Arbcom dismissing cases based on form and function while admitting that there is merit. There are actions that occur on ENWP alone nearly every week if not every day that cause concern about the longterm health of the project because the admins have Zero oversight. In fact as an admin there yourself I am very certain you can think of a few admin actions that were less than positive. I seem to recall you commenting on a couple in fact. It beyond time that the WMF steps on and starts to develop some checks and balances and appeal and review mechanisms to ensure that the admins and functionaries on the projects aren't abusing their access. Reguyla (talk) 15:28, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

┌───────────────────────────────────────┘
 Inviting the WMF to start interfere in projects is a really, really, really bad idea. However you may be upset with local admins on a particular project, what the WMF will do is vastly worse.

There's a point here that I feel somehow got lost in my quickly-written remark saying I wasn't talking specifically about Lila. I wasn't talking specifically about Lila, of course; but the evidence suggests that in fact Lila (not by any means Lila alone) doesn't respect the volunteers. This isn't a "civility" issue. But when the WMF sets itself up to dictate to volunteers, what does that say about the attitude of the people at the WMF who are setting that up? It says that in fact they consider themselves better than the volunteers. It doesn't matter how much they deny it, even to themselves; they actually believe themselves to be better than the volunteers or they wouldn't be behaving like that.

Just a few points of clarification and disambiguation: centralization and respect are not orthogonal and can support each other. On respect: from the day I walked through the door of the WMF I have been religiously repeating that we are here for and because of our users (contributors, readers and donors), so we do not "know better", and staying humble and hungry to understand our users is fundamental to us all succeeding together. When people ask me about our contributors and getting hard knocks on this page, I tell them that I think our contributors are the most amazing people I know and I feel incredibly privileged to get to interact with all of you and find better ways to support you, so you can support the future of knowledge and humanity. This is the thinking I want us all to have, and I especially have been pushing this in product. This is why you see us starting to do a lot of user testing and segmenting our audiences (readers, editors, expert editors, developers, donors). On centralization: Because we have such diverse communities (that often disagree vehemently) we often miss voices and opinions and have to do our best to satisfy the Nash Principle. We are centralized because it is the most efficient way to provide support being as small as we are and standardizing as much as we can. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

The centralization moves that the Foundation has been pursuing — and there are a lot of them, just about everything the Foundation does has insidious centralization deeply ingrained into it — devalue the contributions of local volunteers. Making contribution technically easier (even if you suppose, naively, that that's the net effect of what they're doing) can't even begin to make up for the destruction of fundamental motive for volunteerism that results from routinely demonstrating lack of regard for volunteers. This is closely related to the reason "political correctness" doesn't work: if you use PC words, and you actually hold non-PC beliefs, your words will become imbued with your beliefs, rather than the other way around. --Pi zero (talk) 02:17, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

I have been editing here for more than eight years and have never had the WMF try to "dictate" or "tell me" what to do.
That the WMF staff tries stuff and sometimes fails or causes other unforeseen problems is not unexpected. Everyone who has edited here long enough has broken something.
I have found an amazing amount of autonomy within the movement. The only people who come and give me direction / advice are other Wikipedians and they do so often :-) Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:07, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
The f**king superprotect dictated us by forcing use of mediaviewer dumb and not making it opt-in. — regards, Revi 11:51, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
Yes agree that the use of superprotect to force a piece of software on the community was a big mistake that must never happen again. Thankfully mediaviewer is no longer forced on people. And yes getting this corrected was more drama than it should have been. The individual who made this mis-step is also no longer at the foundation. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 11:58, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
I thought mediaviewer is still forced by keeping its opt-out system. — regards, Revi 13:17, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
If you go to En WP. Click on an image. It takes you to here for example. You can than click to go to commons or you can click to open it with media viewer.
If you click on the gear icon by media viewer you can enable media viewer by default. Otherwise by default it in not enabled. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:16, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
In German wikipedia there is no intermediate page. By default, a click on the image brings you directly to the media viewer. For logged in users, there is an option "den Medienbetrachter aktivieren" ("enable media viewer") in Einstellungen→Aussehen (preferences→appearance). This option is enabled by default. So the media viewer is unavoidable for IPs and opt-out for logged in users. This is exactly what we, the German speaking community of editors, voted to not want.
The vote ("Meinungsbild") turned out to be considerably more than 2/3 in favor to keep the status quo, which was opt-in for logged in users and not activated for non logged in users. Still, the WMF activated the media viewer with an opt-out for logged in users. When a German admin reverted the change by fiddling with CSS pages, the super-protect flag was invented and swiftly applied against this "hack" within hours. Note, that unlike a RFC a meinungsbild is considered to be a binding decision rather than a recommendation. Consequently, the German community was not amused when the WMF ignored the vote and made the media viewer the default anyway. This was the first not enacted result of a meinungsbild ever.---<(kmk)>- (talk) 18:26, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
Yes agree not good. If the situation is that the community wants the software off by default superprotect should not be used to override that decision. I think it is off by default on En Wikipedia or maybe I have simply turned it off.
With respect to whether it is on or off for logged out user did we survey these users to determine which they prefer? If they prefer one over the other than IMO that should hold some weight in that situation. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:20, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
  • I just reset my preferences on en-WP and clicked on an image. Result: I got the media viewer with no intermediate page. So the English wikipedia behaves exactly like the German WP. That is, opt-out for logged in users, media viewer with no choice for IPs.
  • The survey done by the WMF in summer 2014 asked, "readers", "editors" and "frequent editors". While a larger portion of readers found the media viewer useful, this was still a mere 37% in English wikipedia and 40% in German WP. (see the spreadsheet of results at docs.google.com) Put more bluntly, a significant majority of the sample did not find the tool useful.
  • The WMF did not go into any kind of negotiations or rethinking after their own survey, the German Meinungsbild, a RFC on English WP and an additional RFC on Commons all showed widespread disapproval. Instead, it went ahead and activated the MediaViewer by default for everyone.
  • The super-protect as invented to secure the default status of the media viewer in German wikipedia can be set and unset by WMF staff only. There was a poll in German Wikipedia which asked whether or not 1) the super protect flag be removed from all pages 2) WMF personal should not be granted the right to super protect 3) the super protect should be summarily be removed. 4) potential future rights should be in the hands of community elected persons only. The turn-out was record breaking -- 799 participants within 7 days. Note that the number of regular editors in German Wikipedia is about 1000. The results were clear: Close to 87% in favor of the first two proposals, 78% in favor of complete removal, and 83% to put this kind of right exclusively into the hands of community elected persons. Still, the WMF decided to keep the super-protect as is, WMF-staff only, with no checks and balances whatsoever.
The German speaking community of editors was not amused. Some high profile users openly quit the project. Others left quietly. There was talk about a fork. A year later, German wikipedia looks like business as usual on the surface. But what happens when much more disruptive changes hit implementation dates? Think TheFlow, VisualEditor, Winter... ---<(kmk)>- (talk) 00:27, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

I for one do not think that the WMF taking some responsibility for the degrading editing environment on projects like ENWP because the admins corps within it are incapable of doing anything about abusive admins is a bad thing. That would be a sign or respect towards the community and the projects by dealing with a problem that they cannot fix and continues to degrade the projects. The Arbcom process is broken and won't do anything unless you hire a wikilawyer that can navigate their mess of requirements and even then usually dismisses the case with an admonishment. Sure the Arbcom has removed a couple in the past and even this year but only because those issues affected admins, it had nothing to do with editors or whats good for the project except as a collateral effect. The admins and Arbcom won't allow the community to do anything about it because they can only be trusted to "elect" an admin, they can't be trusted with the responsibility of removing the tools from one. So unless the WMF or the board itself steps in to mitigate the growing problem with administrator conduct on the projects its not going to get fixed and will continue to degrade the editing environment. This would be a good name to offer some names as suggestions to start with but I'll stop short of doing that. I do agree we do not want or need the WMF interfering with everything in the community though including some of the areas they have been like forcing the community to use unfinished tools they don't want. In the cases of software as mentioned above every time they did it, they said oh sorry we won't do that again but its just one of those easier to get forgiveness than permission things. The community can't do anything and they know it. So if the only thing they have to deal with is a few discussions about it then why not go ahead and do it. The board won't do anything and the community can't so its a strategic decision in the end to just do it and deal with the fallout from the community afterwards. Reguyla (talk) 15:04, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

English Wikinews has a pretty good social atmosphere, certainly vastly better than English Wikipedia. When somebody comes to the project intent on ignoring local policies and practices, we give them short shrift, and this has led a bunch of, ah, cultural imperialists from Wikipedia to rant about what an uncivil place Wikinews is (basically, it becomes uncivil when they show up, both from their behavior and from locals' reaction to it). So if the Foundation started micromanaging individual projects, I would expect those (frankly) would-be sororicides to lobby to have English Wikinews gutted. Wikipedia is already the bully of the sisterhood, and the other sisters (that aren't Wikipedia annexes) are frankly the sisterhood's hope for the future — not only are the other sisters where growth can occur, they're also where innovation can occur that can then filter back to Wikipedia and help things there. Let the WMF start micromanaging sisters, and you'll destroy any hope for the sisterhood's future. --Pi zero (talk) 18:34, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
I have to admit, I don't think I have ever done one edit at Wikinews, maybe I'll check it out sometime. I do agree that Wikipedia has a history of bully behavior and I am on record in multiple places stating that, so you'll get no argument there from me. Which is part of the problem, and part of the problem is that nothing is done about it and that, I think, is where the WMF can do some good with oversight. Reguyla (talk) 21:08, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

I read that so we do not "know better", from you Lila. And thats why you put superprotect et al in place? Because you don't know better but you have the power so it's not necessary to know better? ^^ SCNR <rotfl> ...Sicherlich Post 19:56, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

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