The Board did not even consider to apologize for the rushed interference of
WMF staff on de:MediaWiki:Common.js which caused so much trouble in the
last days? No empathy for German Wikimedians who feel completely overruled
and locked out from maintaining its display and implementing community
consensus, a long established procedure btw.? No urge on WMF staff to
implement policies on who should use superprotect and when in order to
maintain our display the best, together? By just telling us that they did
what they had to do and would even repeat it identically (without warnings,
discussions, or anything) just in order to remove some bad JavaScript code
which was not covered by community consensus either and hence would have
been removed by local administrators anyway, you most likely will lose much
more trust there and globally which cannot be the goal you wanted to
achieve. Personally, I know that superprotect can be helpful in certain
circumstances because I had to deal with JavaScript abuse on Common.js'es
as a Wikimedia steward from time to time. That is why I support creating a
tool which prevents inexperienced admins from maintaining our display. But
does that necessarily be rushed which will leave an impression of attacking
the community by interfering in their originated responsibilities although
this was not intended? Without any idea which groups from now on will
maintain the display (crats? stewards? on consensus? on WMF instruction),
or does WMF staff wants to maintain all Commons.js, Vector.js, Monobook.js,
etc. on all 900 wikis alone? Some clarifications are needed in order to
solve this problem together. And that should be our goal: working together
to make Wikimedia projects are more welcome place for readers, authors, and
anyone.
Cheers,
Martin
2014-08-14 15:42 GMT+02:00 Jan-Bart de Vreede jdevre...@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Some of you have asked the Board and its individual members for feedback.
Some of us are already in conversation with you or are planning to answer
on different pages. This is our general common statement:
The Board supports the decision to protect the Media Viewer roll out. Our
platform powers a top-5 website. We need operational protocols that are
consistent with this position. This includes making improvements, rather
than a tendency towards reverting to the status quo.
At the Board meeting before Wikimania, Lila laid out her strategy to put
in place best practices for product development. We will communicate
sooner, we will prioritize smarter, we will test more, and we will achieve
better outcomes. Her vision is to involve the community at each step of
product development, including more structured feedback stages and reviews.
We endorse this vision.
We realize that there is concern about the superprotect user right and how
it affects power balance and influence on content and administration. We
recognize the concern that we need to explain and introduce our measures
better. However, stability of the platform is necessary as we seek to
improve our sites, and, for that reason, we support the creation of this
tool. We also understand that with more robust rollout plans and better
staged community feedback - as Lila envisions - the tool should rarely be
used.
We urge you to focus on specific improvements you'd like to see in the
Media Viewer and the roll-out process. Lila intends to incorporate that
feedback as she plans to improve Media Viewer and the process for future
product roll outs.
The Wikimedia Foundation needs to be in a position to make software and
configuration changes for which it is responsible. We expect restrictions
of MediaWiki code-level editing to be a temporary step to enable us to move
forward with improvements. As we say, Media Viewer should be improved; our
procedures to date have not yet met the high standards we want to set for
ourselves. Lila wants to address both now, and we need to give her the
space to do so. She has our full support and confidence as she tackles this
tough challenge.
On behalf of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees
Jan-Bart de Vreede
Chair
Board of Trustees
Wikimedia Foundation
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