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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).
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).
