https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208
--- Comment #90 from [email protected] 2011-09-16 21:51:31 UTC --- Erik Moeller, and Happy Melon, This is indeed not the place to re-litigate a decision but I strongly insist that there is no case for rediscussion the consensus anyway. 'You' should make a real effort to work together with the Wikipedia community rather than constantly assert and reassert the notion of 'us (the WMF) and 'them' (the volunteers). You are not really listening at all to the 'very different perspective from that of, say, our most active new page patrollers, who will know tons of things from first-hand experience that, at least to the WMF folks who haven't been doing NPP Work recently or ever, aren't obvious at all'. Our most active new page patrollers who know 'tons of things' are a tiny handful of highly experienced editors, admins, and bot operators among the hundreds of new page patrollers who haven't a clue of what they are supposed to be doing, and who furthermore refuse to follow the advice at WP:NPP. That tiny handful, has only been active to exhaustion in order to expose and lay proof to the extremely serious problems with NPP, and seek a solution to it. It is difficult to empathise with the arrogance, rudeness, and single-minded approach demonstrated by some of the WMF employees and/or 'senior' developers on this Bugzilla discussion and it is hardly believable that such behaviour and lack of GF is truly representative of the way the WMF works. They hardly need to be surprised that such patronising comments and incivility has been met with expressions of annoyance and profound dismay from a now seriously disillusioned community, many of whom appear to have far greater insight, dedication, and intelligence than those 'senior' developers and decision makers who might even perceive a salary. Some of the volunteers have now voiced that they may no longer wish to stay around. The 'complex social and technical problems' are a red herring and an attempt to evade the real issues concerning the hurdles, 100s of essays, and walls of text and instruction that have amassed over the years that constitute one of the two main causes for the decline in new registrations and new articles. Anyone following http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011 with respect to new page control will conclude that some of its assessments, especially those concerning the work of NPP, and the information that was published at Wikimania, are misplaced - especially those that pretend that 30% of our best contributors began their Wikipedia career as vandals. There appears to have been a complete failure to perceive the distinction between THREE key issues: - Stemming the tide of utterly useless new PAGES that comprise up to 80% of new input; - Encouraging new editors to seek assistance with the creation of new ARTICLES, and providing them with 'easy-edit' solutions - The serious and immediate problem of the trainwreck that the existing method of new page control (NPP) on en.Wiki has become. The 'social' problems are those of a characteristic Wikipedia need to talk endlessly about progress and improvement without actually realising any. The http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_creation_workflow is another exploit in search of the wrong solutions to the wrong problems, and will take months, if not years, to address the issues. The 'technical' problems are imagined - some Wikis already have far more stringent and complex software solutions for page quality control than those that are requested here. Wiki software is based on an easy programming medium, and most managers of Internet forums and blog software know how to use php and js to customise the user groups and permissions. You are not interested in 'finding a tone of equal partnership ' - you have in fact clearly implied that the broad Wikipedia community has now been disenfranchised. There is obviously no sincere intention of 'working together' - the work that was done by unpaid volunteers, along with their consensus has been summarily dismissed with not even an attempt to understand the background for the proposal. In favouring the rights of the riffraff to go live immediately with uncontroversially inappropriate pages, you will ultimately drive valuable, dedicated maintenance volunteers away from your projects. Wikipedia, on its own admission, has never been a democracy, and if it is to be ruled in future by fiat and no longer by consensus from within the individual projects, it is time for an accredited and trusted senior WMF spokesperson, if not the CEO herself, to make that policy officially public. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
