NativeForeigner wrote:Still undecided on whether or not to take this case. I'll ask the same question here I did on wiki (and I'd encourage you to answer it on wiki, but if you respond here no problemo)
Reading comments from the community there is a general feeling that what Erik Moeller did was not ideal (or productive), and that the foundation has a history of not responding very well, especially in technical areas. Sure, some people have disagreed with this assessment, but for the purposes of this argument, I'll assume that this is consensus.
If we assume what Erik did was poor, and the WMF did not interact well in this particular case/set of cases, what do you want the committee to do here that is productive, and not the 'rhetoric without action' which the committee is (oftentimes justly) lampooned for enacting.
The WMF has historically been very hands off when it comes to how the individual "projects" configure their software and their policies, except for a few extensions that would overload the servers (and/or are untrusted), and legal issues when it comes to the policies.
The rather massive fundraising has allowed them to hire a fairly large staff for the tech department, which in theory should be able to do what the volunteer coders used to do but faster, namely improve the underlying software to allow better and more flexible presentation of the end product (the articles).
Unfortunately the attitude of the hired hands is that they see themselves as the masters of the house, with the contributors being only somewhat welcome guests, because they see the wiki itself (which they create) as the product, rather than seeing the encyclopedia (which the contributors create) as the product. IOW, they've got it back-assward.
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