Wikipedia:Ignore Meta

Many users here at the English Wikipedia are unaware of Meta-Wiki (colloquially referred to as "Meta"), a wiki designed and designated for interproject coordination and cooperation among the Wikimedia wikis. For most users, it's okay to simply ignore Meta.

What's the problem?
The problem is that the English Wikipedia is far and away the largest Wikimedia project. Meta-Wiki is pretty small. So, when an issue from here spills over to Meta, (which should actually pretty much never happen, but sometimes it does anyway) there is an influx of English Wikipedia users commenting there. When this happens with other projects, it is seen as what it is, the natural and indeed intended purpose of Meta. When it involves the English Wikipedia, it is seen as an invasion, and many administrators there show open hostility toward this project.

Additionally, Meta has become a haven of sorts for various malcontents who are banned or blocked from the English Wikipedia. For some reason many of the folks at Meta believe it is important to give people who have disrupted one WMF project a chance to screw things up at another one, and these users are given considerable leeway to attack both this project and the individual users unlucky enough to encounter them over there. However, despite being members of the Meta community, they have little to no real power even there and absolutely no power to change policy here or force this project to unblock or unban them, just as the English Wikipedia has no authority to tell Meta that they should be blocked or banned there. They are separate projects with separate communities and neither has any authority over the other. Period. That being said, past incidents have shown that users who primarily contribute from here can get blocked more easily than their regulars or users from other projects. There is a palpable air of hostility towards "invaders" from this project.

Meta administrators
With the exception of stewards, the admins and 'crats on Meta do not go through a quarter of the discussion and comprehensive review that English Wikipedia administrators face as candidates for adminship. Our dispute resolution process also sets the standard for other projects and is thorough and complete. The ultimate arbitrator on Wikipedia for dispute resolution, the ArbCom, goes through an additional month long and wider review with tougher criteria for membership. Disputes that have gone through the English Wikipedia processes and have been reviewed by a body of users with the highest of standards should not and are not to be governed by a project with weaker qualifications for power and lesser standards for conduct. It would be like a high school student body committee acting as an appeals court for a federal district court.

Social challenges
Much like Wikimedia Commons, Meta-Wiki is one of those places where it's nearly essential to first become an administrator before trying to do anything useful.

So Meta is all bad and we should never look at it?
No. In fact Meta does have a few rather important responsibilities. Firstly remember its purposes are technical, not content; so one of the purposes of Meta is to chase down and stop spambots and other cross wiki-vandals. That's a noble purpose and we should be glad they do it. They don't really need the vast majority of us to participate in that. If you are planning to organize a bid to host Wikimania you need to organize that over there. There is also the yearly election of stewards, users who do the actual important work that Meta is there to coordinate. You need an account at Meta to participate in those elections, but you don't have to participate in their community beyond that to do so. The majority of translations for important announcements are organised and done on Meta using the Translation extension. Finally, every so often a page with more than 5000 revisions needs to be deleted, requiring steward intervention; most times the best way to get their attention is to leave a message on their noticeboard at Meta.

Fortunately it really doesn't matter
Given the friction and the fact that many users there don't want users from here coming over, there is a simple solution: "Ignore Meta™". The positive work they do is pretty much invisible, and the rest of it is irrelevant to this project, so don't waste your time subjecting yourself to the unpleasantness you are likely to encounter from the broader community over there. If you see a dispute from here continuing over there, don't worry about it. It is probably just a troll doing some trolling, and it is up to the community there to put a stop to it. If they would rather put up with it and pretend like any decision they make has any impact over here, let them. It won't make any difference to how things run here.

This page is retained for historical reference
I was the primary original author of this, it has been modified quite a bit by other since then. This was created in response to a really awful, ridiculous incident that happened in early 2012. A dispute from here, that was eventually the subject of an arbcom proceeding, was allowed to continue at Meta despite the fact that their user community have no authority whatsover to determine how user problems are handled here. At the time, there seemed to be in some quarters there a palpable air of contempt for this project and open hostility towards it. This incident was instigated by such users enabled by by a small number of admins there who actively intimidated and bullied anyone who tried put a stop to it.

The end result of this debacle was the removal of the most abusive administrators who were involved and the introduction of an analog of WP:INVOLVED over there to prevent something like this happening again.

Observing these events, this essay was toned down considerably. In the intervening years the purpose of Meta has become more clear, and the advent of single unified login, global user pages generated at Meta, and other global policies and practices have further changed the purpose of Meta and the relative advisability of ignoring it.

In short, I don't think what happened four years ago would be allowed to happen there now, the lack of activity in the last three years at this essay suggests that it is having little to no effect here, and I just don't think we need it anymore. I am explicitly not advocating marking it as historical as I'd rather it was just gone as the incident that led to it seems well and truly gone and forgotten.