[WikiEN-l] How to bring back people who don't want to bother?

Thu Jan 12 05:06:34 UTC 2006

AEvar wrote:

> What exactly do you mean by this? How are we not accountable and how
should we, in your opinion, be?

If developers were accountable to the community, then the community
would set priorities, schedule, and goals (with due regard to the
technical realities), and expect the developers to follow them.  There
would be some sort of community approval for each functional change. 
That's not the case at present.  I don't really know how actual
developer decisionmaking works, although it's clear that the developers
respond rapidly to Jimbo's requests (such as the recently added
semi-protection feature and the recent proscription on page creation by
anons), and it's clear that there's a good deal of internal coordination
within the developer community.

Evidence of the lack of community accountability can be seen by such
things as the changes in deletion log behavior being somewhat of a
surprise to most Wikipedians, and by the fact that relatively important
yet minor tweaks such as the repeatedly requested change to the effect
of IP blocks on logged-in users have gone unaddressed for over a year.

I realize that the developers spend a great deal of energy on
scalability issues on an ongoing basis.  I don't intend to be critical
of their work.  Rather, I am trying to point out the reality of our
governance situation.  That reality is that any process change that
involves a software development component is unrealistic to plan
without strong leadership to Jimbo, because the community alone can't
compel the software developers to act.

I also think it's worth pointing out that the MediaWiki software
project, the WikiMedia project as a whole (of international scope and
covering wikibooks, wiktionary, and like projects in addition to the
encyclopedias), the en: Wikipedia, and other projects have goals that
are sometimes in conflict.