First, thanks to John Vandenberg for considering co-mentoring the
accuracy review project for the Indonesian Wikipedia. I think he would
be an excellent co-mentor. But ideally I also hope to also obtain at
least one co-mentor from WMF engineering, design, or education
divisions, and a co-mentor from the WEF too, please:
 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review#Mentors_needed_.28at_least_two_co-mentors_required.3B_please_sign_up_here_if_you_are_interested.29

Oliver Keyes wrote:
>... the question Rachel [asked] was (to rephrase it):
> 'community people, what ideas do you have for better
> ways for us to communicate around software?'
> 'Work on my thing' does not answer that question.

Co-mentoring the accuracy review project is literally nothing but
communication. Community members ask for the Foundation's help all the
time. And even if the mentors end up helping with some of the code,
Rachel asked about interacting with the community, not just
communicating with it.

And it should not be "my thing" -- it is supposed to improve
wikipedias and similar references in all languages, by addressing
their primary existential crisis: more out of date content than
volunteer editors are willing or able to maintain. It's lucky that we
may be able do that with the side effect of creating the largest
automatic computer-aided instruction system ever, by several orders of
magnitude. But that's more than just I can possibly do just in my
spare time. It will have to be a community effort. The Foundation
can't directly sponsor content improvements, but creating a system to
support the community's efforts in that regard is fine. Assuming
everyone approves after testing, either Foundation could, if they
wanted to, cause it to be used in many ways which would not risk the
WMF's safe harbor provisions. That would be more difficult for the
community.

Furthermore, there was no way 2.5 years ago, when I was asking that
the Foundation pay market rate for technical staff to compete in
retaining and attracting the best and brightest, that I would have
known this would become a GSoC proposal under a new co-mentor
requirement today. So the insinuation that there is some kind of a
preconceived attempt at quid-pro-quo is absurd. There are some very
serious downsides to repeatedly being the only one opposed to
groupthink, and I have no regrets about bringing up the fact that I've
repeatedly had to deal with that kind of impediment to progress
without even a single word of thanks. I'm not asking for a medal, just
common courtesy. And maybe people who find themselves in situations
where they might be involved with groupthink mistakes should be a
little less harsh against those who are trying to fight such mistakes.
Our contemporary top-heavy economic predicament is the result of too
much groupthink leveraged by the sociopathic few, resulting in the
vast majority of consumers having lost ground during the current
economic expansion (e.g., as shown in
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/upshot/the-benefits-of-economic-expansions-are-increasingly-going-to-the-richest-americans.html
-- especially its graphs.) If there is a better example of
unsustainability, I would like to see it. Yes, I stick my neck out to
fight for people who are getting the short end of the stick, and
causing their own organizations, whether they be foundations or
nations, to be less effective because of it, and I'm proud I am one of
the very few who do.


On Saturday, 14 February 2015, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Rachel diCerbo wrote:
> >...
> > Community Engagement is continuously considering effective ways of
> > interacting with you around product development and would love your
> > suggestions. What kinds of communications from WMF would you like to see?
>
> Please volunteer to co-mentor my GSoC proposal:
>
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review
>
> There is absolutely no way I can possibly do this without a co-mentor
> from the WMF or WEF. It's not a hard task, and one of the major
> benefits I just learned yesterday is a robust implementation of
> per-word text attribution, which amazingly still hasn't been available
> to the wider community in a way that handles reverted blanking and
> text moves since WikiTrust went offline. Maribel Acosta, Fabian
> Floeck, and Andriy Rodchenko did a suitable replacement algorithm in
> 2013, but it hasn't been folded back into the Wikimedia Utilities
> distribution....
>
> Best regards,
> James Salsman

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