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Happy birthday, world! Following my New Year’s resolution, I am gradually moving my scheduling, notetaking, and planning to public wikis and this blog. It has been a slow year so far*, with occasional bursts of excitement. But there have already been two enormous discussion coming up in the Wikimedia world, the sort that generates thousands of pages of interesting discussion.
I have noticed that the most difficult discussions tend to benefit not just from open discussion, but from clusters of discussion among different groups and audiences. For instance, the controversial content discussion over the past years had some success when it was a single large group working through ideas on Meta. But it wasn’t until many communities organized many different discussion groups in response to a (misnamed) referendum held on the topic, that the best reflections came out. The German Wikipedians in particular organized a discussion that neatly laid out various options and their pros and cons, and made a strong case that an image hiding feature was a technical solution to an editorial problem, and not helpful to many of the audiences that might want one.
* But now that I am over some personal tribulations I am getting back to my normal routines and typing speeds.