[Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments

Tue Sep 7 23:14:44 UTC 2010

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 5:03 AM, Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/9/7, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>:
>
>> Presumably this conspiracy would have to extend beyond the WMF to
>> PediaPress and Purodha Blissenbach, the developers of Collection and
>> mobile.wikipedia.org respectively.
>
> The absence of a history tab in the mobile format is in my view an
> exact measurement of the temperature of the warmth of the relations
> between the WMF and its contributors.
>
> Let's not call this a conspiracy. Philosopher Pierre Bourdieu  would
> call it an unconcious strategy (1). Developping software costs money
> and time. Maybe especially time. Developping both feature A and
> feature B is too expensive when most people will care only for feature
> A. Feature B is dropped because people who had feature B in mind feel
> that they will not be rewarded for it and they stop insisting for it
> and it finally fails from being included in the specification. And yes
> the outcome is that people did a great job developping feature A.
>
> (1) [His] theory seeks to show that social agents develop strategies
> which are adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit.
> These strategies are unconscious and act on the level of a bodily
> logic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu

Teofilo -

Unless you can provide a concise reason why this is a
Foundation-related issue, I strongly urge you to go back to the French
language Wikipedia and resolve it locally there.

If you can get consensus there that it should be disabled, I am sure
that the sysadmins will follow your local request and disable the
feature with the config option for your wiki.

If you are coming here to attempt to go around a consensus there that
it was OK, then you are abusing the Foundation and the mailing list
here, and you should stop doing so.  If that's what you have done,
then it's a sign of disrespect for your compatriots on fr.wikipedia
and for those of us here that you attempted to do this in this manner.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com