On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 6:05 AM Yaroslav Blanter <ymb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear All, > > I thought I would just let it go, but I do not think the discussion > currently runs in a good direction. > > I do not think it is useful to advocate that Meta is a good discussion > platform. It is not. It is dead. At best, there are some announcements > posted there, and there is a small group of people who monitor and comment > on them. If there is something really outrageous going on, such as the > recent rebranding attempt, users can be mobilized from the projects to > leave their opinion. This is done by the project users who care, it is done > inside the projects or using some extra-Wikimedia means, and it can only > happen occasionally. If this does not happen, Meta discussions attract at > best a dozen commenters, some of whom are just negative towards everything. > > We tried to do something about this for at least 15 years (I myself was > around and have been an active Meta user since 2007-2008). Things are not > getting better, they are getting worse. > These are great points, thank you Yaroslav. The tone of this discussion is painful to read; angry and argumentative, even rude. But that's likely a function of your last point - things are not getting better, they are getting worse. Yes, Meta is an ugly and dysfunctional place to hold a discussion with many people. That reality leads WMF teams to search for alternatives that work better to achieve specific, discrete goals. That's a reasonable pursuit for Quim, for instance, whose scope is managing the movement strategy process - not shepherding MediaWiki development strategy. Complaints are better directed at the ED and board - why, after all this time, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on [something] and raising hundreds more, does MediaWiki feel frozen in 2008? Why are discussions so often held on other platforms? If this is a desirable outcome (e.g. a decision has been made that WMF can't replicate the ease of use and modernity of other platforms, which are continually innovating, and we made a decision not to chase Discord and IG and TikTok etc.) then maybe that's ok - if it is articulated somewhere that people can see when they are frustrated with why everything can't take place "on-wiki."
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