[Foundation-l] The status of smaller languages on the Wikimedia Commons

Fri May 5 20:51:34 UTC 2006

--- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> You do not get my point. When policies are to be
> changed, when the way 
> things work are to be changed, this is when you
> should inform the 
> communities in advance. Some careful marketing
> communication is what is 
> needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And
> you /need /to inform 
> your customers; when you do, you talk to all your
> customers when you 
> don't you have to deal with them one at a time and
> you may find that 
> customers do no longer give you their custom. Given
> how busy you are, 
> you would not even notice.

I disagree with this sentiment in general terms.  If
the "customers" are not making an effort to watch the
pages where policy decisions are disscused, they
should not expect to courted by those wishing to
change policy.  The community that is actually doing
the work of maintaining a project should have the
ability to set policy without going out of their way
to court the fly-by-night users of the project.  I do
not think it is wise to try and alienate the less
active userbase, but it is unrealistic to wait for
their reaction before making any decisions.  

The English Wikisource recently made a major change to
it's incluson guidelines (which involves the eventual
deletion of around 200 pages).  We held open
disscusion for over three weeks, and the material is
now being slowly phased out without a mass deletion. 
Although there was a small amount of advertising
amoung people with a specific interest, the
participants in the disscusion did not vary from the
regular editors.  I cannot agree that it should have
been advertised at large across projects.  I am very
happy with the way we have handled this situation
which quite at odds with your sentiments.

It would not be productive during a major policy
disscussion to issue an invitation to people who have
no idea how a project operates on a day-to-day basis. 
The community which actually *works* on a project
needs to be the ones to set policy.  If the people you
consider "customers" find that the community no longer
serves their needs, they should work to carve out such
a niche themselves.  These projects are all operating
with a limited amount of volunteers and I cannot
imagine any of them would ignore the corcerns of
people willing to get their hands dirty.  But when
someone has the mindset that they are a "customer" and
want to reallocate these existing voluteers to take
care of their pet issues, well I won't be so impolite
as to express what I think of that.  Now they are
welcome to share these concerns.  Many people can
vouch that I am willing to drop my current project to
help them deal with issue I agree is important when
they bring to my attention.  But to say projects
should not attempt to set policy unless they
personally invite over all the people who are standing
on the sidelines is ridiculous.  Even if such people
are the most informed, intelligent, reasonable people
on earth, they will not be a useful addition to policy
disscusions until they have worked within the project
and achieved such understanding that can only be
gained by experience.  The fact that infrequent users
may not *like* the communities policy descision is not
reason enough to hold off on any decision till they
have been consulted.

Birgitte SB

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