Board Post

[astolat]

Hey all, speaking for the Board here, a few things re the most recent post, now frozen:

We do get being frustrated with how long the policy revisions are taking, but this community is not a public complaint board about the Wiki committee, and such posts are off-topic.

Policies are going to be posted for public comment when they are considered ready, which is not the same thing as building policies in public, which is not practical and which we just don't do at all in the org. That's not at all about not wanting to include many voices, but policies are difficult enough to draft and revise even in private with a small team of participants, as you can see from how long it is taking.

The Wiki committee is under a bunch of constraints, including that official wiki policy has to be approved by the Board and Legal committees as extensions of official OTW policy, and the new draft just isn't there right now. To some extent the latest delay is due to very recent legal developments that we feel let us significantly broaden the policy, which in the long run is an awesome thing, but in the short run means another round of changes. We're really sorry about the slowness, but it doesn't make sense for us to post draft policies for comment that we know are not where they need to be. It will overall save time for us to get them into better shape first.

Just like with the Archive TOS and the OTW FAQs, we *will* put it out there for comment -- nothing new is going to actually be put in place and enforced without a real opportunity for everyone interested in the wiki to provide input. That's what we can and do promise.

Similarly, the Wiki committee may sometimes just need to try things out on Fanlore just to see how they work and look before a policy or process can be formulated internally and then put out for comment; and in particular, with technical solutions, we may just need to implement whatever solution looks like it will work best with our systems. And there are other committees in the org such as International Outreach that also have a stake in something like having more international representation on the wiki, which we try to balance with other needs.

We *will* try and do a better job of communicating in more detail what is going on to you guys, but if you're really interested in the nitty-gritty of policy back and forth, or knowing everything that is being tried out on the wiki, then I hugely encourage you to please contact Volunteers and volunteer to join the wiki committee, for whenever there is a vacancy.

And more broadly, even if that isn't feasible for you or there isn't an opening, keep in mind that the fundamental underlying goal here (for all of us!) is to make Fanlore easy and fun to contribute to and make it a really useful resource, and if we do somehow land on a policy or a technical system that turns out to work against that (either before or even after it is finalized and implemented), we can and will change it.

communication/development of policies

[ratcreature]

While the Wiki Committee has been somewhat more visible this year than before, I still feel the communication with the rest of the Wiki users about the ongoing development of the policies is not very good.

I can understand the reluctance to post unfinished things that are still in discussion in the smaller group of the committee in public, but otoh with the lack of slightly more detailed "in progress" updates topics just vanish and others appear without transparency, and for me this causes a lack of feeling like that we are working on building a wiki and its policies together, but instead things appear to suddenly come down from "above".

To be a little more concrete, for example back in April there was that image policy discussion based on the first draft the committee has worked out, and there was lively discussion, feedback for the draft, some disagreements and competing goals etc. and then it went back to the committee for revision. So far, so good. Then there was nothing further said on this comm or the news on the wiki that I remember seeing however there were brief mentions in the OTW newsletter you could glean, i.e. in May it said "[we] have been working with Legal to continue to revise the Image policy based on user feedback" and in June "the Image policy is still in the hands of the OTW's Legal committee" (that committee's update in the newsletter didn't mention anything in detail) and in July it was "Work continues on category refinement, the FAQ, and the templates for the new Image policy." So when that was posted on July 31 I thought "great, the policy is finished (if they are working on the templates already) and will be posted soon, yay!" but almost three weeks later it hasn't been. I guess the decision may have been to wait with posting anything until all templates and the technical side is finished and polished too, but I would have loved inbetween updates.

Then yesterday through the Talk:Stargate Rollenspiel page I hear that the committee has been discussing different namespaces for different languages, and that apparently that page was a trial for the backend that has been installed. That hasn't been mentioned or discussed anywhere I have seen before, so I felt really surprised by that. Not least because I thought the committee was working on the image thing and on the technical side of that. Of course there can be work on both, but I didn't know there was now some focus on translation, when the increase of our editor base in general goes quite slowly (so to me expanding into translation efforts with whole different name spaces seems somewhat "pie in the skie" like and I didn't think it would be a project right now to expand into non-English articles).