Hi, thanks for the response.
However, i think i owe you a bit of an apology. I was sad the choice i
liked didn't make it final round, and there was a bit of lashing out in my
previous email, which was not cool. Anyways, the voting process wasn't
perfect, but such processes never are, and that is ok.
Cheers,
Brian
On Thursday, October 8, 2020, Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup(a)gmail.com> wrote:
(Sorry for late response, this email fell into cracks
of my messy inbox)
On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 1:53 PM bawolff <bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
TBH, I was under the impression that the second
round was going to be
narrowing down to top contenders (maybe the 3 or so top designs), not
choosing the top contender (I guess that's my fault though, it wasn't
stated anywhere that that was going to be the case or anything).
Actually the plan originally was to put anything that passed the basic
wiki thresholds (70%) but nothing beside the first proposal did. I could
add the proposal one and the other ones as runner ups but honestly it feels
weird advancing a logo design that had an opposition for each support.
It was kind of hard to follow the first round
with 20 something proposals
It was only 17, didn't even reach 20.
with some of them benefiting from showing up earlier than others, and most
of the votes taking place during the time period
where votes were allegedly
not going to count yet.
That's true, I accept the mess up on my side (I have been planning this
and asking around for more than a year now but it's not like you coordinate
such changes on a monthly basis, I'm definitely learning), I tried to
compensate by giving a full month for the voting period which is pretty
long plus giving periodic reminders.
I did notice that some of the people voting had
never previously edited
mediawiki.org (Or made very few previous edits). It kind of feels a
little weird to treat this as a "vote" (and not a "consensus"
building
exercise) if we don't have eligibility criteria.
This is the part that changing the mediawiki logo is different from the
usual wikimedia decision making process. The reason is that in for example
English Wikipedia, the biggest venue of contribution is
en.wikipedia.org
but the biggest venue for contributing to mediawiki is not
mediawiki.org,
you make patches, you report bugs, you help people in IRC, and so on. If
you counted that, I assume a huge portion of the voters would be considered
eligible if we count venues like phabricator and gerrit. Also for example
for "picture of the year competition" in Commons, the eligibility is not
the number of edits in commons. It's the number of edits in any wiki and if
we want to count the number of edits in any wiki too, then I'm pretty sure
virtually every voter would be considered eligible.
I do kind of wish there was a none of the above option.
Proposal four was the status quo, it clearly didn't pass (with 39%)
Looking through the votes, I definitely see some
people saying things
like "Least bad option", which is not exactly an inspiring show of support.
Well, for each neutral or weak support in the proposal six, there was one
person who showed "strong support". And this is the thing with logos,
it's
not like a voting on a policy change, supporting or not supporting a logo
is a very subjective matter, for a similar situation look at elections,
there are people who go crazy about a candidate and people who are just
like "less horrible than the other candidate" and this is normal, people
are different with different perspective, If I wanted to force my
perspective, I would have advanced the first proposal too and even in the
variants for the current proposal, my favorites are not getting anywhere
but that's okay. Logos have lots of oobjective factors (like accessibility,
proper abstraction, color consistency, simplicity, brand awareness, etc.)
but the biggest one is the general look and feel and it differs from person
to person. That's why companies do extensive A/B testing on design, it
caused backlash too, for example a lead designer who left Google in protest
that they were doing A/B testing on forty different shades of blue which
basically destroyed the artistic freedom of designers (we are not going in
that direction but we need to acknowledge the subjectivity of designs)
HTH
--
Brian
On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 8:50 AM Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hey,
The first round was using the standard voting process in wikis (using
support/oppose and the thresholds like 70%) and this is the way we elect
admins, checkusers or other user rights, or change policies in Wikis. I
don't recall that there has ever been anyone elected as admin with below
70% or we have ever changed any policies with below 70% (not to mention the
runner up logos are 56% and 61%, basically for any support, they had an
opposition). Our logo is similar, no logo except proposal six could reach
seventy percent and while there were good designs that almost made it but
clearly none of them has enough support (and percentage of support) to
reach the next round. That's a pity (one of the runner ups was actually by
me) but if that's what the community wants, I happily accept it.
The second round has always been
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaWiki,_2020/Round_1&diff=4006263&oldid=3997205>
about different variants of the logos that pass the first round.
HTH
On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 9:30 AM Adam Wight <adam.wight(a)wikimedia.de>
wrote:
Hi, thanks for helping coordinate this process!
I have concerns about what happened between round 1 and round 2, it
seems that we're no longer left with a real choice. It's unclear what
method was used to tally the round 1
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaWiki,_2020/Round_1>
votes, was this a "support percentage"? Whenever a vote is taken, it's
important to stick to democratic norms, basically "one person, one vote".
Round 2 is entirely variations on a single proposal, which disenfranchises
everyone who didn't prefer that design. Is it too late to discuss?
Kind regards,
Adam
On 9/25/20 11:42 PM, Amir Sarabadani wrote:
Hello,
The subject line is self-explanatory, you can go to the voting page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaWiki,_2020/Round_2>
and cast your vote.
This is going to continue for a month and it's about different variants
of the top contender (different colors, different wordmarks, etc.). You
need to order logos based on your preference (the most preferred one first,
the least preferred one the last) and then cast your vote. The final winner
will be chosen using Schulze method
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method>.
If you have mistakenly voted in the test phase, you can just copy your
vote from the test page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ladsgroup/Round_2/votes> to the
actual voting page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaWiki,_2020/Round_2/Votes>
(the numbers of logos haven't changed).
Special thank you to Chuck Roslof from WMF legal for doing the
preliminary clearance of the proposal.
Have a nice weekend!
--
Amir (he/him)
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