Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy: Recommendations and community conversations launching next week

[Chris Keating]

>
> Superprotect is now over five years old. Superprotect's removal is now over
> four years old. It was a mistake, and it was explicitly acknowledged as
> such: the then-ED of the WMF said it had "set up a precedent of
> mistrust". Almost all of the people involved in it are no longer affiliated
> with the Wikimedia Foundation, and in fact, plenty of the staff members at
> the Wikimedia Foundation were hired *after* superprotect was removed.
>
> I don't think bringing up superprotect in this discussion is especially
> relevant or helpful.


I sort of want to agree with this, but actually I think it goes a bit
deeper.

If you ask questions about the relationship between the WMF and the
community, sooner rather than later someone will talk about Superprotect.
If you ask any of the 1,000 people who signed the petition against
Superprotect, most of whom are still active one way or another, then
Superprotect will probably be the first thing out of their mouths, even
though it happened 6 years ago. It's sufficiently ingrained in peoples'
minds that asking these people not to talk about Superprotect is like a
British person asking someone from the USA not to talk about the Boston Tea
Party.

In part this is because people were very angry about the issue at the time,
and that anger was dealt with very poorly at the time.

In part it's because people perceive there is nothing to prevent an
identical situation recurring. In some ways I think this perception is
unfair, for all the reasons you mention. But it still exists, and in part
it exists because of things the WMF has not done.  The Foundation's
expectations about how it interacts with the community remain fairly
unclear and fairly undocumented, from the Board level down. I recall there
have been some written statements of how the WMF now handles product
features, though I think this didn't come the ED or less the Board. I don't
believe there was ever a written review publilshed of Superprotect, while
there are written reviews and statements lessons learned from many other
situations that had much less impact. In short, the WMF is not seen as
having put the issue to bed in a way that results in everyone involved
moving on.

Thanks,

Chris
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy: Recommendations and community conversations launching next week

[Pine W]

Hi Dan,

I think that there are a couple of lines of thought here. I think that
we should make a distinction between individuals and the institution
of WMF.

For the former, I think that you make a good point. Along the same
lines, there were probably people who worked at WMF at the time and
had no involvement in the decisions regarding Superprotect, or may
have done internal advocacy against it.

For the latter, the institution of WMF remains, and so does the
loosely defined organization which I call "the community". WMF's
actions in 2019 with regards to English Wikipedia's governance had
some disturbing parallels with Superprotect.

An issue to which I've been giving increasing thought recently is the
distinction between an individual WMF employee/contractor and WMF as
an institution. I especially try to be mindful of this distinction
when employees communicate in public and say that they are
communicating individually, that is, not in a WMF role. They take some
personal risk in doing this, and I usually think that their comments
which are made in their personal capacities are constructive and made
in good faith. The same goes for WMF employees who volunteer for
projects such as Commons photo campaigns or in the strategy process
outside of their work hours. Where the situation becomes more complex
is when WMF employees are participating in what appear to be their
normal staff roles. Sometimes a decision that is made by one person in
the organization in their staff role will not be a decision that other
people in the organization would have made in the same way, but when
someone uses a staff account then I generally attribute their actions
to their employer.

Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy: Recommendations and community conversations launching next week

[Dan Garry (Deskana)]

On Sat, 25 Jan 2020 at 23:49, Pine W  wrote:

> Here are a couple of arguments from WMF in favor of SuperProtect, which was
> implemented to prevent local users from removing MediaViewer.


Superprotect is now over five years old. Superprotect's removal is now over
four years old. It was a mistake, and it was explicitly acknowledged as
such: the then-ED of the WMF said it had "set up a precedent of
mistrust". Almost all of the people involved in it are no longer affiliated
with the Wikimedia Foundation, and in fact, plenty of the staff members at
the Wikimedia Foundation were hired *after* superprotect was removed.

I don't think bringing up superprotect in this discussion is especially
relevant or helpful.

Dan

Source for most of the above: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Superprotect
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy: Recommendations and community conversations launching next week

[Aron Manning]

On Sun, 26 Jan 2020 at 00:49, Pine W  wrote:

> Here are a couple of arguments from WMF in favor of SuperProtect, which was
> implemented to prevent local users from removing MediaViewer.
>

It's interesting that this topic came up, as there was a bug in MediaViewer
that disturbed me so much I've started working on a patch a month ago. The
bug is no longer an issue in most cases, but I'm still working on some
improvements.

It seems to me that users still could disable MediaViewer with the same one
line of javascript as used in Common.js. To be exact about SP, what I've
seen is it was implemented to prevent local admins (specifically one former
German admin) from removing MW project-wide for all editors *and readers*.
I assume the "Disable MediaViewer" option, which allows every user to
decide for themselves comfortably, wasn't implemented back then...
How long before that feature was added?

Aron
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,