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Archiving happened again. :-) Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 12:21, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It became clear to me from the Visual Editor fiasco that communication between the WMF and the community was, at best, broken. Although I accept that things may have got a bit better with regard to VE (which I keep half an eye on) the whole sorry story above makes it clear that there's still a serious issue. I also accept that the WMF is aware that communication is an issue but I've yet to see anything from the WMF that suggests you're trying to fix the problem. Now you may be discussing it amongst yourself, and I believe you are, but this doesn't seem a very good way to get the handle on the problem as you're going to have a biased view, only half the story etc. At the height of the VE stupidity I asked what the WMF was doing about the communication issue and was told you were aware on it and working on how to improve. Several months later I've still seen no attempt to engage the community on this. Have I missed where this is occurring? Surely you can see that the WMF saying here's what we think the problem is and here's what we're doing to fix it with no community input is only going to annoy the community, especially as it will seem so similar to what happened with VE. This seems to be a good time to ask this as Flow is already creating some similar issues to VE so although things may have got better they still seem a long way from good. Dpmuk (talk) 23:56, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Does the WMF react slower, or faster, to such concerns than the much larger private-market Symantec? Interesting question, I think. The last time Symantec messed up a major software release (which they did in a very big way), there was howling for blood, and the fixes were much too little, much too late. And continued to be so permanently :) --Demiurge1000 (talk) 01:05, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• I am making motions off-wiki for community involvement far earlier in development processes. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. --Pine^✉ 08:26, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• @Dpmuk: I speak to volunteer developers about their work on a nearly daily basis, to see if the engineers in my team can help them. I email the stewards and other holders of advanced permissions about changes we're making that will affect them (such as the OAuth rollout or the migration from oversight to suppression). I am engaging previous election administrators of SecurePoll elections so that our upcoming improvements to it are appropriately targeted to their needs. Is this communication with the community? Yes. Is it visible to most people? No. If there are issues you have with the communications about a particular product, then please do raise those issues and the relevant teams will try to sort them out. But remember that the Wikimedia Foundation and the community are not homogenous groups, and in my opinion you do your argument disservice by referring to them as such. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 06:11, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• DGarry (WMF) thumbs up on the communication. I think WMF has learned from VE and AFT5. I hope this has happened in time to keep the encyclopedia's characteristics and the volunteer population at sustainable levels. There are many issues that have contributed to volunteer decline and I hope projects like Flow and VE will assist with improving the trends when they are deployed. --Pine^✉ 05:55, 17 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Dpmuk I think WMF has hired more community liaisons for some of the reasons you mention. It's a fair criticism that some of this should have been seen sooner but there's not much we can do about that now. It will also be interesting to see what the new ED does. --Pine^✉ 05:59, 17 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• @Pine: We're also recruting a Director of Community Engagement, a newly created position at the WMF. The position is meant to help improve the communication and engagement channels between the WMF and community which are, I think, sometimes a bit broken at both ends. I highly doubt it'll be a silver bullet that solve all of the issues, but it should help, at least. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 06:23, 17 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• @DGarry (WMF): I think that community engagement director is going to be in a difficult position. I think there are communication problems at both ends and I think there are also a lot of other issues in leadership, ownership, and governance. Philippe is in this mess already and I think the engagement director will be also. I think the community feels that WMF can be authoritarian and overestimates its skill. This happens with product development like AFT5 and VE but also with programs like IEP and the recent problems with the board's decision about affiliates. I also think from the volunteer's point of view WMF is separate from the volunteer movement although individual WMF employees have said that they think the groups are homogenous. WMF has done some good work but the things that are most visible to the community seem to routinely cause friction. I think the board and the ED need to be working these issues with a broad scope. --Pine^✉ 20:39, 20 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have been putting off responding to this comment because i wanted to say what I need to in a non-defensive posture, and I'm carefully choosing my words toward that. I've been an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation for 5 years. I'm a Director for one division, and my team is tasked with some incredibly broad reaching jobs, including supporting the negotiation of the new Terms of Use, the new Privacy Policy, the new Trademark policy, etc. My team deals with about major 100 cases per year (according to our case tracking system) - VE, for instance, counts as one case for that purpose, as does each of the things that I just listed - and several hundred more minor cases. We dealt with nearly 100 crisis interventions in addition to that (these are what they sound like: suicide threat responses, etc) and referred a significant percentage of them to law enforcement. In addition to that, we oversaw training every new staff member in the LCA team (including all interns) and a significant percentage of the other new staff hired by WMF this year in community interactions. In those five years, there have been exactly three instances (with which my team was involved - I obviously can't control ones where I'm not involved) where I would honestly state that something was broken with our communication. In all instances, I think there were significant external sources that added to the conflict as well. I think those three instances must be viewed in light of the thousands of positive interactions, many so quiet that they're rarely noticed, that we have been involved with. When we do our job right, you shouldn't even notice we've been involved. So, frankly, I refuse to stipulate to - or accept responsibility for - the whole premise. Does that mean things can't be improved? Of course not, and this incident has served to very personally remind me of that. There are those who say that "the sky is falling" on communications issues here - I don't think it is. We got a new Terms of Use, a new Trademark policy, a new Privacy policy, worked to deliver an upgrade to OTRS, and provided ongoing intense and expert advice to WMF staff about how to engage with the community, etc. It can get better - it always can - but I think the record of my team and my own communication are pretty good, on the whole. This community subjects us to scrutiny that's absolutely unbelievable, and still - on balance - I think we withstand that. I'm sorry that you don't agree.

I hope that the overall issues with communication between the WMF and the editing community can be healed - the hiring of the Director of Community Engagement (Product) should help with this, I think. But I'm hesitant to accept full responsibility here - even on behalf of the whole WMF - because I think it's a huge, broad question that needs to be considered from a number of angles, including determining what, if anything, the community can do to help with this effort. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 07:38, 17 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you consider e.g. VisualEditor as one instance, then your count may be correct (seems low even so). But within VE, there have been at least a dozen communication breakdowns, and they seem to be ongoing. The opt-out / opt-in discussion was the major one, but far from the last. Something like the character insertor discussion is to me a major communication breakdown as well (the "I sent this to 1000 people and no one responded" defense and so on, and the complete disconnect seen in that discussion between the WMF team, including the so-called community liaisons, and the actual community). Fram (talk) 08:25, 17 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Phillipe, thank you for the response. I wished you'd at least given a holding reply so that it looked like you weren't ignoring it (it took over 10 days for a response) - a small suggestion for improving communication there. I understand that it may not be the right time for writing a proper reply but even a simple "I've seen this and will reply later" is reassuring that we're not being ignored.

I have to agree with Fram here that your metric seems a bit wrong. Most of the things you list either apply to a relatively small group of people (e.g. OTRS upgrade) or are likely of interest to very few people (I think you'd have to suggest a pretty outlandish change to the terms of use for most people to care) so I think people not noticing your involvement in these things is more a sign of that then you doing it right. I'm not suggesting you're doing it wrong on these issues, merely that people not noticing you on them is not a good sign your doing it right. VE, by contrast, will have been noticed by most editors and several of them would have cared about it. Here you've very definitely been noticed and it would appear not in a good way.

You suggest that I don't think you're doing a good job. While that's the impression I get I accept that I don't know enough to make that call. And that's my point, from what every one at WMF says I don't think you do either as you seem to be basing your assessment on people's feed back on projects but unless you go and look for feedback from the wider community the people who give you feedback are likely to be very far from a representative group. For example you suggest you get very little negative feedback on how you dealt with the terms of use changes but is this simply because people weren't aware of it. Have you pro-actively done a survey to see how many people were aware of it and what there thoughts are once they were aware of it. The most vocal group are always going to be those unhappy with what you're doing so the result of such a survey may well be you're doing a good job but without doing something like that I can't see how you can say the community thinks you're doing a good job.

I will happily admit that the community could also have dealt with things better but without more interaction with them how can both sides find out what the other side thinks they did wrong and move forward from there? The WMF simply doing what it thinks will improve things seems unlikely to work.

You say that the community subjects you to unbelievable scrutiny like that's a bad thing. Any sort of comparison to a commercial organisation isn't really fair as Wikipedia isn't one it's a charity. Comparing you to normal charities isn't really fair to the size and nature of your volunteer base. Wikipedia is breaking new ground here and I think we'll still trying to find a model that works. Yes you got a lot of scrutiny but that may be because that's the only way to keep volunteers on board and without volunteers the project is nothing.

In short I do think WMF staff genuinely think they're doing a good job when it comes to interacting with the community and that you care about getting interaction right. I just think that you may be sticking your head in the sand too much and not really getting a good handle on what the community thinks. If you could say here that you'd got the views of a reasonable cross section of the community, not just those that are vocal about it, and that most people were happy - preferably with real results presented, rather than just a statement of fact - then I'd happily agree you're doing a good job and it's just a minority, all be it a vocal one that disagrees. However to date no one has been able to say that to me, let alone present evidence to support it. Dpmuk (talk) 03:03, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting arguments. Taking the TOU for example, we ran massive banner ads and negotiated it with the community over huge discussions that included more words than the Steinbeck novel "The Grapes of Wrath". The Privacy policy? More words than "Catch-22", and the Trademark policy? "Hitchhiker's Guide" (Yeah, I like the analogical feel of the book titles, I admit it.. I suck at remembering word counts). There were a large number of community members involved. But, as you point out, nowhere near the full community - we can obviously only deal with those who show up. With all that said, you raise an interesting point about proactive surveys, and one that's well taken. I'll think on that some. Thank you for taking the time to expand on your comments, and for caring. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:11, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

PS - the comment about a "response coming" comment is also well taken, and quite correct. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:13, 18 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Personally I think WMF Legal does a good job. I'm most familiar with the work of Geoff and Michelle and I respect them. I think that Community Advocacy for a number of reasons gets to deal with issues that are decided in other departments. I think James Forrester should get credit for holding regular IRC discussions about VE and I'd like to see similar initiatives in many departments of WMF. Legal does similar work with their public policy discussions. I think having more of these discussions would help with a number of issues including communications. I also think it would help to have monthly ED office hours. --Pine^✉ 07:21, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think you may have just strengthened my point as I was not aware that James Forrester held regular IRC discussions. Now personally I don't use IRC as I believe to much is discussed there that should be discussed on wiki but I wonder how many people either were also not aware of this, or if they were did not want to use IRC for whatever reason. This may be a case where the WMF think they're now doing a good job communicating but lots of editors may disagree due to the chosen medium - again I'm not saying that is the case just pointing out that I believe it's a plausible situation. Obviously by doing the discussions in the first place it shows the WMF are willing and trying to communicate with the community I just wonder whether they're doing it the best way. Of course people commenting here are also going to be an unrepresentative group as we've found this page. Dpmuk (talk) 13:05, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We post to village pumps. We write emails. We use IRC office hours. We use video conferencing. We bring volunteers to the office. We hold hackathons both as dedicated events and also at Wikimania. We use central notices. We send emails to mailing lists. We invite people to email us directly. I've probably missed a few things, too. From where I'm standing, short of spamming people with endless emails and talk pages notices, and then those users either unsubscribe or totally tune out, we have no more options. Given that we do all of these things already, what is the way we can improve? I am not asking this rhetorically; if we're missing something, I genuinely want to know so we can fix it. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 19:44, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Dpmuk and Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation if we're talking about VE only and about bulk public outreach only I think VE is now doing a good job. As the recent example with the board and Affcom shows there are still gaps. I can give some other examples. It took me months to get a reply to a question that I emailed to Legal, I never got acknowledgements to emails that I sent to Sue and her assistant in 2013, Finance told me February 12th they were working on annual plan information that would be posted in "a day or two" and nothing has happened yet that I know of, three emails to two people in HR were not acknowledged, and I asked a question here on February 11 that hasn't been answered. Most of these communications are about routine topics or even topics that other people had expressed a lot of interest in so I don't know why people aren't responding. This is frustrating and it happens all over the Foundation. The inconsistency is consistent. --Pine^✉ 20:52, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Dpmuk what VE communications do you read? They may be missing the announcements of VE IRC meetings. --Pine^✉ 21:13, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dan Garry - I'm not sure the problem is so much with were you're doing things, it's how you, and I suppose the community as well, let people know where to look for these things. In no small part I think this is due a bigger problem with the wikimedia software - our help system is, IMO, still not fit for purpose (although having just looked at it I've noticed some improvements). It is far from clear that any new user could use the help system to find any of the venues you mention (using the search box on the main help page to search for software brings up a wikipoject as a first result for example). From personal experience it took a long time for me to find the village pump after I started editing Wikipedia. I still don't have a good handle on what mailing lists exist and where to find them. In many ways I think this is the root cause of the problem - the WMF think they're communicating well because they post to all the places they can but it's still not getting through to many editors at the coal-face - I hate to think what the situations like for readers. Do I have the solution, no, hence the reason I advocate a survey or similar to get a real handle on the problem and hopefully start working out where we can make things better.

I also think that this has essentially been the root cause of many of the VE, and probably other problems. The WMF thought they were communicating well and so have come across as being a bit standoffish - "we are communicating", while many editors thought that this wasn't the case and thought the WMF didn't care about editors because they didn't communicate. I'll be honest that was my first impression after the VE debacle and it's only after discussion with several WMF staff that I've realised you really do care about editors and are trying hard to communicate, it's just not working right. I suspect many editors who haven't had the discussion I have still have the impression you don't care and that's causing some of the bad feelings. This is something the WMF and community need to work together to solve, but at the moment I'm, disappointingly seeing very little movement on this front (well at least until Phillipe's comment above) - although of course, somewhat ironically, you may be doing things and I'm just not aware of it.

As to the problems Pine gives I would agree that it does reasonably often come across that WMF staff ignore communication - for example I posted to User talk:Tbayer (WMF) last year with a similar post to what started this and never got a reply. They may not have like my attitude (which I agree was a bit, unintentionally, confrontational), they may have been busy or there may have been several other reasons they couldn't give a proper reply but failure to give any reply is irritating. Then again I note we as a community are equally bad at this - for example reports at WP:ANI that get archived without anyone commenting on.

As to where I watch about VE, I have both WP:VEF and WP:VPT watchlisted although it's relatively easy to overlook a post on these pages given their high traffic. I do think the idea of a WMF noticeboard, once suggested by User:Mdennis (WMF) and written off as being another noticeboard may now be worth visiting given the major changes to the software etc we're now going through. Dpmuk (talk) 21:37, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dpmuk you make several good points. Our help system and our many communications channels are spaghetti which makes everyone's jobs harder but this has been known for a long time and nothing has been done about this in a broad way. For the help files it would take a big effort on English Wikipedia to get those organized and would require so much work that an IEG grant might be appropriate. On the WMF side some of them are very good about their email and some aren't. I think a lot of them care but for some reason a number of requests, emails, and ideas fall through the cracks. I've heard that the WMF office culture is optimistic but disorganized and I think these traits are visible in the issues we're discussing here. --Pine^✉ 08:10, 25 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Dpmuk: I've passed the idea of a WMF noticeboard onto Howie, the Director of Product at the WMF. Since we're already making posts in a lot of different places, I think a model like the Arbitration Committee noticeboard could make sense here; we could continue to post our notifications to multiple locations, but also post supplementary notifications to the WMF noticeboard with invitations to discuss on the respective page rather than at the WMF noticeboard. I doubt it would be a magic bullet to solve the problems, but it may help. I'll discuss that with a few people and see what comes of those discussions. Thanks! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 01:22, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@DGarry (WMF): and @Dpmuk: instead of creating a new noticeboard for people to monitor would it be easier and more effective to use the existing Meta goings-on list? A lot is announced there already. --Pine^✉ 21:01, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Philippe (WMF): in your CA role can you encourage WMFfers in general to be consistent about checking their email and watching the talk pages of reports that they publish? Thanks, --Pine^✉ 21:01, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, I created a WMF noticeboard and it was deleted please see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WMF noticeboard and the deletion review. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 21:16, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I did create WP:WMF out of what I learned from that experience, though. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 21:16, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was aware there had been past attempts, just not aware of that one. What I was thinking of more though was a notification only one. I would agree there's better places to discuss things, such as meta, the village pump etc, but a central page for the WMF to post notifications I think would solve a few issues. The two that immediately spring to mind are that it's easy to lose notifications on big pages such as VPT and the problem with meta is changes don't show up here so for people that don't frequent meta very often (or at all) they may not notice even if they have meta pages listed. I also noted that that page was deleted before VE was turned on by default and the issues that caused so consensus may have changed some. Dpmuk (talk) 21:31, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

DGarry (WMF) What you're missing is a sense of scale; there are 118,331 active users spread over 6,834,890 articles, most of whom will never run into contact with each other or the 856 admins, let alone the relative handful of WMF employees. What this means is that the "Wikipedia community" as some sort of coherent cognitive entity is as real as a Unicorn. A much better model is that of multiple overlapping sub communities. In practice what that means is when someone complains about "WMF not communicating with the community," what the means is "WMF has not recently communicated with the tiny section of English Wikipedia that I care about." If you wish to make the multiple communication venues more accessible, I suggest creating and maintaining a section in Wikipedia:Wikimedia Foundation listing the venues you've just mentioned. NE Ent 11:03, 1 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@NE Ent: I actually think that I'm not missing that nuance, as I alluded to in my first post in this thread where I explicitly acknowledged that both the WMF and the community are actually heterogenous entities, which is a different (but equivalent) way of putting it. Philippe, his colleagues, and others such as myself, are working on ways address these problems, but this is a highly complex problem that likely does not have a solution; instead we'll just have to work on incremental improvements. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:56, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@DGarry (WMF): and @NE Ent: I think WMF is working on globalizing watchlists. With or separate from that work someone could develop a system of global watchlist notifications. The notifications box will need to be organized and curated if it gets a lot of use but I think it would work. Do you know the status of global watchlist development? --Pine^✉ 23:16, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think anyone is working on global watchlists at this time. Such technology would be dependent on other things (Flow and GlobalProfile, most likely). --Jorm (WMF) (talk) 00:05, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Jorm (WMF): Ok, I've made a list of communications improvements that have been discussed or are in development.

• mw:Flow
• mw:GlobalProfile
• Global watchlists that could include global watchlist notifications
• Cross-wiki talk page notifications
• Newsletters extension

What is the next features project for communication after Flow?

Thanks, --Pine^✉ 05:28, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The answer to "what is the next features project for communication after Flow" is "there is none." Ultimately, Flow will encompass global communication - in fact, that is a core feature of the product: cross-wiki communication and subscriptions. When fully functional, Flow will eliminate the need for a newsletter extension or global watchlist events on discussions. The idea of a "global watchlist" will then apply only to content pages, and that feature is so low on the priority list that you should assume that it won't be tackled by the Foundation until at least 2016 or later. Aside from that, there's an issue of technology prioritization: any "global" communication technology will be based on GlobalProfile, whose cross-wiki functionality will be based on Flow technology.

Now, it is entirely possible that there exists some (very) small splinter group of engineers and designers within the Foundation who are somehow developing some sort of global communications software without having talked to the product or design teams and may just spring it on everyone. I don't think that's the case, though: a big part of my job is having insight into what is going on across the board. And it's entirely possible that a volunteer development team has built something, or could build something, that does this. But even if that happened, that technology would have to be vetted against our product plan, which has been pretty solid since on or about the second week of March, 2012 (which is when we set down the plan) and how badly it would disrupt us or if it would even work with the roadmap.

Basically, I'm saying: No, global watchlists are not on the plan. They would be a distraction from the plan.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 06:37, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In case you are not aware, please see WP:VPM#We are all Diu which concerns an el.wiki user who is the subject of a law suit for an edit to a politician's article. Someone may have notified the WMF, but I can't see mention of it. Johnuniq (talk) 05:10, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Johnuniq. We are aware and are providing some assistance, though I'm not sure exactly what. I'll see if I'm free to disclose that. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 13:40, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Johnuniq:, please see this link for more info. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:43, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What a lovely blog. I particularly like the references at the end. Yes, some people have a fundamental lack of understanding of how the intertubes work. Risker (talk) 18:53, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that's a great response, and I see it is now at el:We are all Diu. I gather that Diu has edit warred to remove the material and has been blocked for three days. However, the user is still an admin and I would have thought that for their own protection all rights should be removed until this affair is over, and without the user having to request it. I'm not looking for a discussion on that—I just wanted to raise the matter for private consideration. Johnuniq (talk) 22:45, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Philippe and Mpaulson (WMF) --Pine^✉ 05:48, 17 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Template:ArchivingSoon Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 07:46, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Please update us on the new Wikipedia standards / policies to address BLP, privacy, defamation, etc issues. Where are these located ?

Please review [1] and [2].

It is extremely distressing for defamed article subjects, including organisations (and their in-house legal teams) to be forced to become Wikipedia editors and have to deal with incompetent / unempowered OTRS volunteers, battleground editors, and also the numerous helpful editors and Admins who are helpless with community self-written policies and guidelines which encourage such BLP and Libel etc. violations in the name of "free speech" (especially anonymous free speech).

At the same time we appreciate that a significant number of complaints may not be fit to be taken up directly by OFFICE or the General Counsel.

In this context India's Highest Courts have reviewed the stand taken by US MNCs like Google , Facebook etc. and the present legal status in India is that on formal complaint by an affected person under the Concerned Legal Rule to the "internet intermediary" the disputed text must be first be disabled (preferably within 3 days) and the matter resolved within 30 days at the very most. These directives (also given to Wikipedia) were passed on a judgment of the Delhi High Court last year against Google and Facebook, now extended to all "intermediaries", the "penalty" for contravention including blocking the intermediary from India. We would like to know how WMF views the aforesaid directions and if any "Grievance Officer" or similar process exists for defamed Indian article subjects to complain to ?

DISCLAIMER: This is not a legal threat, but a request for specific information. HRA1924 (talk) 15:01, 25 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello HRA1924,

Well, obviously, IANAL (I am not a lawyer), so I'm singularly unqualified to answer all your questions. However, I'll take a stab at what I can...

The Wikimedia Foundation is an organization that is organized and run from the United States, and is therefore subject to US law. With that said, however, there are existing complaint processes that you can utilize. As just one example, if there's a problem with "incompetent OTRS volunteers", then the OTRS admins are an escalation point. Wikimedians generally have provided for an escalation point for all issues - if you can't determine where it is, please feel free to ask me. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 19:54, 25 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We appreciate that you cannot answer all queries for the reason/s you have cited. We shall certainly approach an active OTRS-Admin to see if such Admins are now sufficiently empowered to remove from the impugned article (as a conflicted / affected party we shall not do so ourselves) the libelous text we specify (which the OTRS volunteers did not do) in terms of [3] and considering that Admin:Sunray - the mediator appointed for our closed mediation case - has recorded [[4]] that the other editor(s) to our dispute did not participate after the issues were settled [5] and the issues we had provided were fit to proceed further with [6]. HRA1924 (talk) 03:55, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We have referred our cause to OTRS-Admin "Tiptoety" [7]. In the course of our submissions there we linked to [8] which in turn linked to [9] - the previous version of which was this [10]. What we want to bring to WMF's notice is that it took firstpost.com precisely 8 minutes (by the clock) to act on our email complaint that their article wrongly reported Anna Hazare as an IAC leader, and to remove all references to India Against Corruption from their news report. Wikipedia's performance for grievance redressal process to abused BLPs is pathetic in comparison. Can you highlight this within WMF ? HRA1924 (talk) 10:42, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

ANI that might concern you - see Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Tendentious_IDHT_even_after_mediation. - Sitush (talk) 11:27, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Phillipe, can you please guide us to the policy which says that if a WP editor who has agreed to mediation drops out to avoid discussing his edits which are at issue, it is a behavioral issue for which the concerned editor can be banned for disruptive editing. As a defamed article subject, we resent such blatant attempts by disruptive POV pushing anonymous editors like "Sitush" who are abusing WMF servers (and other computer resources) to defame us and to thereafter "chill" our usage of WMF processes for grievance redressal - as we were invited by WMF to use by the WMF's OTRS facility. HRA1924 (talk) 13:57, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, but that's not a WMF policy, and as I am responsible for roughly 700 wikis, I don't track the local (non-WMF based) policies on all of them. I'm conversant in the broad strokes (things like OR, and NPOV), but I don't track them on a more incremental level, such as you're addressing. So I'm sorry, but no, I can't guide you there - not because I'm not willing, but because I simply don't know. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:46, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note to Philippe and TPS, this user has been blocked. --Pine^✉ 20:55, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, Philippe,
Continuing our discussion from AN/I, I have held several elected positions of responsibility in nonprofit associations and what became quickly apparent was:

1. Unless you are handing out grant money, most people only contact you if they are upset about something.
2. If everything is going fine, few people show up to talk to you at open meetings or office hours unless it is a condition or responsibility of their position. I used to hold elaborate catered meetings and have 5 people show up. I used to be depressed at the low turnout until someone more experienced told me that it meant I was doing a good job because most (not all but most) people who show up do so to complain that they are unhappy with the way things are. Or for information on applying for grants. ;-)
3. No one but the previous person who held your position has any idea how much work you have to do just to keep things going in maintenance mode, not even your coworkers. You can keep busy just putting out fires and keeping the status quo and actually initiating lasting change requires a lot of work, communication, coordination and time. You can have a brilliant idea, try to make it happen several times, it falls short every time and the next person who holds your position makes the same proposal and it passes. Sometimes you can only plant seeds that will fruit at some later date when the time is right.

At least this has been my experience, especially when one is in a position where one is responsible to an entire "community". Bottom line, most editors do not know what you all do at WMF (unless it makes the papers) and they do not understand why changes aren't made or why the changes that seem obvious aren't made immediately. The more they know about both the nonglamorous work you do and some of the more crazy things that come across your desk, the better they can understand WMF as an organization and have reasonable expectations.
I think blog posts are helpful because they exist in perpetuity, they aren't just read for a week but can be read at any time in the future. I've read a lot of WMF reports and blog posts from the past five years and found them to be very useful. What is crucial is for any description about your work to be informational and relatable and that it doesn't come across as complaining. I'm sure many editors would love to work for WMF in some capacity and while it is interesting to know more about what you all do, you should acknowledge that despite the headaches, working for WMF is a pretty damn cool job!
Just some thoughts! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:53, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for those great thoughts, Liz. You're absolutely right, by the way - and I say it frequently - that I have the best job in the world. I've done some of the coolest work that I can imagine, actually. It's really important to point that out - and, frankly, it's an honor. I'm going to think on what you've said here. Thanks for taking the time to put some thought into it. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:11, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think you missed this. --Pine^✉ 07:37, 1 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]