On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 6:54 AM, Nathan <nawr...@gmail.com> wrote: > I see Brandon replied to this thread several times; did anyone notice > if the question in the OP (if community consensus is required for > implementation, where was it demonstrated for en.wp) was answered?
As a matter of general practice, the Wikimedia Foundation aims to be responsive to the community both before and after the deployment of software, but it doesn't obtain community consensus before deploying software which it would like to deploy on its sites and services, nor does it necessarily write or deploy software changes if a consensus to do so exists. That has always been the case; indeed, there was no explicit consensus ahead of time for the vast majority of major software changes in Wikimedia's history. Being responsive and applying appropriate effort towards a problem shouldn't be confused with a constitutional commitment to act only with, or never against, a consensus in a community. We've never made such a commitment as a general principle. Some features, like WikiLove, require community customization to be useful in the first place; others, like FlaggedRevs, influence a community's practices so deeply that they require both the community's expertise and buy-in to succeed. And of course there are lots of small tweaks and customizations that communities can request from us, but we can only respond to them if they can demonstrate that there's a consensus to proceed. However, if we found evidence that, say, WikiLove turns out to be the best thing since sliced bread (which of course it isn't, duh -- it's just a small bit of culture shift), then we might put lots of effort towards working with the community to localize it and deploy it globally. As it is, that particular feature is still experimental, and will likely continue to change shape and application, as we better understand the dynamics of how it is used. The partnership between WMF and the community is founded on mutual trust. If you don't trust WMF, you can - and probably should - contribute your effort elsewhere, because WMF may - and probably will - do things you won't like. HTH, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
