In my opinion there's a large and pervasive problem behind today's controversy: in striking contrast to our core value of openness, it is very difficult to even *perceive* how important decisions like this are made. Both the technical and the editorial processes are pretty opaque to the average main page visitor.
I suspect there are ways the Commons pages relating to Picture of the Day could be improved to make it clearer to the reader how decisions are made, and how to meaningfully participate in those processes. For instance, main page content could have a link named something like "how did this get here?" that would permit the reader to view the discussion that led to its inclusion on the main page. (This is just an off-the-cuff idea, to illustrate the general kind of usability changes I would like to explore.) To put it another way, the issue behind today's controversy that interests me most is access. Increasing the ability of a large and diverse group to participate in important decisions (like what gets featured on the main Commons page) is something that would both honor the basic values of our project, and (I believe) support better content decisions in the future. Anybody interested in tackling this issue? -Pete _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
