Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-05-27/Foundation elections

Meta: "a specific kind of mess"?
Please see current and past discussion: See also:
 * Village pump (proposals).
 * Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-07/Op-ed, "Op-ed. Meta, where innovative ideas die". See the comments from many editors.
 * WP:Integrated watchlists (shortcut for Integrated, interwiki, global watchlists). --Timeshifter (talk) 07:17, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Timeshifter, thanks; I'd forgotten about that op-ed ... it is just that, though, the opinion of a Wikimedian. I think we're hoping for a lot more community feedback and questioning of candidates (see the link to Meta above). Tony   (talk)  09:17, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The Op-ed got a lot of supportive comments. The Signpost is one of the few truly global communication tools that Wikimedia has. There would be a lot more community feedback and questioning of candidates if candidate discussion occurred on the Commons or on English Wikipedia, instead of only on Meta. See: Wikimedia Foundation elections/Board elections/2013/Candidates. So few people check the Meta watchlist. Many more people from many more countries check the Commons and English Wikipedia watchlists. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:48, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Ah, and I still have a draft for a complementary op-ed highlighting all of the ways that we currently collaborate off-wiki rather than using Meta. It is easy to organize a one-off solution for a specific group; harder to do something that produces a useful RecentChanges feed for everyone who supports or watches meta-issues. Integrated watchlists are coming, slowly.

As to the commons/meta question - commons currently has such a strong bias towards media-savvy people and those familiar with its high-throughput processes that this could be socially complex. And I expect we will have additional thematic meta-projects such as WikiData in the future; forcing Meta to become double-meta, in a way. But we could make it much easier for participants in other communities to work on Meta; it should be a testbed for the best cross-project, cross-language, and cross-community collab tools. – SJ  +  18:19, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * SJ. You are on the WMF Board of Trustees. Why is it the case that "Integrated watchlists are coming, slowly." This has been requested by so many people for years. Now that you are on the board I suggest you push for a massive increase in funding for developer work directly related to integrated watchlists. Here is another detailed page on it: Watchlist wishlist. On a related note please see: Petition to the WMF on handling of interface changes. That problem would also be solved by an integrated watchlist, because then Meta would actually be useful for communication between the WMF, developers, and editors across all Wikimedia wikis worldwide.


 * If that is going to take years more, then in the meantime the scope of the Commons needs to be expanded to include Meta, Outreach, Strategy, and other interwiki communications. There is no reason there could not be separate departments on the Commons for each of those areas. It would also help with templates in that they would not have to be duplicated anymore. I have 19,000 edits on the Commons. Commons admins would have no problems helping handle those additional communication and discussion tasks. They communicate constantly and skillfully with people from many countries who speak many languages. They are exemplary in this. Meta admins could become Commons admins, or start off with being given provisional admin status in order to work only on Meta pages.


 * There are many ways this could be done. One way is to do it with folders. As on Mediawiki.org at Technical communications/Mobile documentation consolidation where there is a folder for Technical communications subdivided by sub-project. There are many such folders for various projects on MediaWiki.org. It would be easy to do this via Special:Export on Meta, and Special:Import on the Commons. One uses "Destination root page" in the Special:Import form on the Commons, and enters "Meta". So all pages moved from Meta to the Commons would start with commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta - I have tested this on another wiki when importing stuff between wikis. It works. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:15, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Timeshifter, I see what you mean about adding namespaces or folders to commons.  I thoroughly agree that an integrated watchlist would make Meta useful for communication between WMF, and users of meta:, mw:, commons:, wp: and other wikis.  Not long ago we seemed on-track to have cross-wiki messaging, including talkpage alerts and watchlists.  Now that has been bundled into Echo, which for its first iteration declared cross-wiki features out of scope. (However the discussion continues.)  We do need to make watchlists more broadly useful specifically to enable tracking of a single issue or category across many wikis; that is certainly on my wishlist.  Thank you for pointing me to that summary on mw. –  SJ  +  23:11, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

re: "almost entirely in English" - this may be true if you count all namespaces, but only about 50% of mainspace pages are in English. m:User:PiRSquared17/Random πr2 (t • c) 15:27, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

The sinking ship that is Meta
It's funny how some people are so desperate to close all discussion about moving Meta somewhere where significant numbers of people might actually use it, and its watchlist. 2 such discussions were closed by admins in less than 10 hours after they were started. One discussion on Meta, and one on English Wikipedia:
 * Village pump (proposals). Closed in less than 10 hours. I started this discussion. I am in the top 2000 editors in number of edits on Wikipedia. It is funny that the closing admin said discussion needed to occur on the Commons and Meta. I had notified Commons and Meta about the discussion. It is amazing the amount of misconduct admins get away with nowadays. Especially amusing in light of the following:
 * Proposals for closing projects/Closure of meta-wiki. Closed in less than an hour, and then reopened, and re-closed, etc., and finally closed after 8 hours total. It was proposed by the respected editor, User:Rd232, who is in the top 1000 editors in number of edits on Wikipedia. It was a proposal to move Meta to another location, or to its own namespace.

Finally, I noticed this today:
 * Technical communications/Mobile documentation consolidation - Mediawiki moving documents from Meta to Mediawiki.org. People are leaving the sinking ship that is Meta.

The bottom line is that unless WP:Integrated watchlists is implemented in a serious way, Meta will slip further and further into the deep waters of oblivion. One thing I noticed from the Village Pump discussion is how little interest Meta evoked except almost exclusively from editors and admins from Meta. Most people ignore Meta, and that is sad, and it is an injury Meta inflicts on itself by ignoring constructive ideas and criticism. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:20, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Um, the project to move Meta content to MediaWiki.org has nothing to do with this. Meta-Wiki used to host technical files about extensions, but a separate wiki was set up for that. πr2 (t • c) 15:11, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
 * It looks like a lot more than that. See Technical communications/Mobile documentation consolidation and the lists there. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:44, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
 * So? The Mobile team wanted to move its content to MediaWiki.org. I'm sure it's not because of the problems you name with Meta. Even fewer people check their MediaWiki.org watchlist, as you would say. ;) πr2 (t • <i style="color:#03f;font-family:Arial">c</i>) 19:16, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Meta and MediaWiki.org have similar problems concerning integrating their watchlists with one's home wiki watchlist (English Wikipedia for me). Mediawiki.org also uses the hated LiquidThreads for their talk pages. --Timeshifter (talk) 12:27, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Election delayed by one week
As posted on Meta, the Elections Committee has delayed the start of voting for one week.

Thanks to the Signpost staff who have been diligent in bringing information about these elections to the English Wikipedia community. Risker (talk) 21:15, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the note, Risker. I've updated the relevant Signpost pages. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 22:36, 31 May 2013 (UTC)