Topic on Talk:WMF product development process/2015-11-05

After the first wave of feedback, there were three questions either asked explicitly or implied in comments, that are now included in the Q&A for clarity:

• Why is Superprotect being removed?
• Why is the WMF doing this now?
• Is there an alternative to Superprotect?

The last question refers to comments about how technically easy would it be for the WMF to restore Superprotect, and also to doubts about the WMF perhaps looking for alternative ways to achieve the same goal. What matters is that the WMF will resort to the product development process and to regular community processes to seek consensus and resolve disputes, not to technical means like Superprotect.

Suprotect was invented, created and implemented in a cloak-and-dagger operation to impose the will of the WMF onto a community that dared to disagree with some decision regarding not-ready-for-primetime software.

Instead of just enabling the community consensus by better tweaking the commons-js in the right way (or whatever was necessary to implement the only right option of opt-in), they simply used might, no arguments needed. There was never any real justification for superprotect, besides consolidating the superior power of those in SF over those unwashed masses in the community.

"Disabling" superprotect, without a sincere apology for those bad-to-the-bone deeds by those rough hackers in SF against the wikiverse, means nearly nothing. especially since it's clear, it could be reinserted in no time any time in the future. OK, the main aggressor, Erik, is no longer employed by the WMF, and those who stayed mum in the board an let this extreme hostility towards and disdain of the communities linger didn't get reelected mainly because of this, so there's hope it will not happen again, but...

This whole issue is made more conflicting with Flow in the pipeline or not (depending on how you read the different posts by different actors in development) of the WMF, despite the pushback from the communities. With the bad example of the useless hostility by the WMF against the communities, lot's of editors expect the same arrogance and pure might with the next pet project of some programmers in SF after MV and VE. I sincerely hope that they finally have learned something, alas the AGF-bucket is next to empty after all those rough actions.

@Sänger, we are here to collaborate. Collaboration requires trust, and trust requires respect. No topic justifies the hostility you are showing in your comment. Please edit it and share your opinions in a respectful way. See also Code of Conduct/Draft.

Sorry, but the hostility was initiated by the WMF with it's putsch against the community on deWP. The implementation of superputsch and the actions graved in stone this ways was nothing less then a declaration of war against deWP.

MV should never ever have been forced with pure might, without legitimate reasons, against the community, just because you could. Even the lifting of superputsch from the page was done with the explicit thread not to dare to implement community consensus. That's not something that generates trust.

Trust was severely destroyed by the WMF with its actions. The WMF has to do something to regain trust, this here ist mere saying, not real doing. On the horizont the next desaster after VE (completely and with full knowledge beforehand botched by WMF in its first implementation) and MV (I just descibed how it was seen by those outside the blinkered WMF ivory tower: installed with disdain for the community, explicitely with ruthless threads against two very big ones) is Flow, some half-baked forum impersonation, that mainly breaks the connection between talk pages and the wikiverse. But somehow some people in WMF-dev-circles seem to see the next messiah in it, and so the fear of the next desaster is a quite real one.

If you say clearly, that such huge projects like Flow, MV, VE will only be implemented after explicit consent by the communities in the usual community vetting process (MB, RfC, whatever it's called in the wikis), without caveats, and do so on some official policy page here, it would probably regain some lost trust towards the WMF.

WMF has done nearly everything to loose all trust in the past, it's quite easy to ask for, but quite impossible to get, if you're proven untrustful. You have to prove that you really changed your way of acting, that you really know by heart that the WMF is only a service agency for the real wikiverse, the communities.

Seriously, we are STILL warring over this? What's happened has happened, please please please stop making a point of pushing a view on how it has happened. The WMF want to move on, most of the communities want to move on, can we just do so and try and work it out in the future, not constantly looking back to the past? If you expect them to move on, my best advice is to do the same yourself.

The WMF wants to move on without any real apology for what it has done. And your biased writing on the other side here, to whitewash what really happened, is another sign of no real grasp of what really had happened. That's what happens, once you remove yourself from the people and rule just with might, like Erik did.

There never was any need for superputsch, all those high-paid programmers in SF should simply have implemented the community consensus od opt-in, everything else was plain ruthless brutality by those with putsch devices.