On 2 September 2015 at 14:17, Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Oliver Keyes
<okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
For what it's worth, the line " For one
thing, they can turn out
negative, in which case we will have been spared a philosophical
debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the
wrong approach.
Debates about the Wikimedia ethos tend to be highly subjective and thus
costly both in terms of time and emotional resources. Measuring whether
banners work is fairly simple and objective. It makes sense to perform the
cheapest prerequisite checks first, to minimize total cost.
And without any answer to my question about whether this was an actual
A/B test, and whether you're measuring overall user utility rather
than 'did they download it', this is also highly subjective and costly
both in terms of time and emotional resources.
But you're missing...well, two important points. First, as Brandon
says, these debates /have to happen/. Identifying that something is a
*right* thing to do, an *ethical* thing to do, cannot happen after
that thing has been done. And second: costly in terms of time? Costly
in terms of emotional resources? This thread is costly on both, and it
is also an inevitable consequence of not having the discussion in
advance.
Yes, having discussions takes time and energy. And sometimes you don't
like the outcome. Those are a given outcome of talking to people. But
they are things we do /regardless/ of whether we feel like not talking
to people would be easier (not talking to people is always easier) and
they are things that, nine times out of ten, are actually a massive
saving on time and emotional energy. Because it means you can have
conversations with people exploring the ethical costs and benefits of
doing an action, and then do (or not do) that action, rather than do
that action and then deal with /outraged/ people who are approaching
the situation not as a hypothetical but as something that actually
happened.
And it's apparent, from the replies to this thread, that this decision
did not save on emotional energy - it just offloaded it. We have
multiple staffers and volunteers sat here sending messages that boil
down to "this does not represent me. This is not the movement I work
towards". That's not a tremendously pleasant experience for us. We
have an expectation on us, as human beings and movement members and
staffers, that we will consider the /systemic/ impact of what we
choose to do and not do. Describing talking about it in advance as too
much of an emotional load makes it appear that that evaluation was not
adequately performed.
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Oliver Keyes
Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation