[Foundation-l] New list admin: Ral315

Sun Aug 17 21:50:51 UTC 2008

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:49 PM, Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2) However, what kind of mail would you have liked? You said that you
> didn't want a boilerplate email, okay. But how do you write "personal
> emails" to the ca. 10 applicants who we did not choose? Either you
> keep it very short and simple ("Hi, this is to inform you that you
> were considered but that we found Ral315 to be the most qualified
> candidate after all"), which would be a form of a boilerplate again.
> Otherwise, you'll have to outline for every candidate the exact
> reasons why the successful candidate was "better" (read: more
> qualified) than him and it's a) difficult to formulate this without
> being impolite and b) it takes a lot of time.  In fact, I know until
> now absolutely *no* company that will write you a personal letter
> explaining why you, in particular, were not chosen. I don't know
> whether in the US, corporations have that large HR departments that
> they can make this effort, but it doesn't strike me as SOP.

There are a lot of useful thing to be done for Wikimedia projects,
community, WMF, free knowledge... If there is a will to do so, it
should be used. If there is just one place for list admin, it is
reasonable to keep a list of other possible tasks and to offer one of
the tasks from the list to candidates which didn't pass.

Maybe it is time to think about canalizing enthusiasm of Wikimedians
toward higher involvement.