On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 11:13 AM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote:
> de:wp convinced you. What would it take to convince you on en:wp? (I'm > asking for a clear objective criterion here. If you can only offer a > subjective one, please explain how de:wp convinced you when en:wp > hasn't.) > [Speaking personally, not for the VE team in any way.] Why should a consensus of any arbitrary number of power editors be allowed to define the defaults for all editors, including anonymous and newly-registered people? Anonymous edits make up about 1/3 of enwiki edits, IIRC. Every day, 3,000-5,000 new accounts are registered on English Wikipedia. These people are not even being asked to participate in these RFCs. Even if they were, they typically don't know how to participate and find it very intimidating. This system of gauging the success of VE is heavily biased toward the concerns of people most likely to dislike change in the software and frankly, to not really need VE in its current state. That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that they don't speak for everyone's perspective. The sad fact is that the people who stand to benefit the most from continued use and improvements to VE can't participate in an RFC about it, in part because of wikitext's complexities and annoyances. It is a huge failure of the consensus process and the Wikimedia movement if we pretend that it's truly open, fair, and inclusive to make a decision about VE this way. In WMF design and development, we work our butts off trying to do research, design, and data analysis that guides us toward building for _all_ the stakeholders in a feature. We're not perfect at it by a long shot, but I don't see a good faith effort by English and German Wikipedians running these RFCs to solicit and consider the opinions of the huge number of new/anonymous editors. And why should they? That's not their job, they just want to express their frustration and be listened to. To answer David's question: I think we need a benchmark for making VE opt-in again that legitimately represents the needs of _all the people_ who stand to benefit from continuing the rapid pace of bug fixing and feature additions. I don't think an on-wiki RFC is it. Steven _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
