Interesting. @wikipedia :wiki1: is accused of the same hostility and has the same difficulties to attract new contributers. However there is no beneficial dictator. There is Wales, but he never contributed to software or content and plays no role in both topics. There was Sanger, but he left the project in its first year. There is @magnusmanske, but he is not the maintainer, only a longtime and prolific contributer.
All of which makes me think, there is more to it, than a bad beneficial dictator and a hostile community.
We have institutional memory though. How our peers act in other FOSS projects that we may be involved in can make that sort of behavior seem acceptable.
To me this is more, how do we foster community, rather than I want to dictate your conversation. I don't.
Its more I'd like a bit more empathy before the reply.
I mention the BDFL as that happened to be in the examples in the post I wrote. But we are all ambassadors for our communities.
@onepict@Life_is@theresnotime@Raymond bad communication habits have been rampant in foss world since before wikipedia began, and our community (dev and editor and overlap) grew up within those unhealthy norms. i definitely think that difficulties in wikimedia foundation staff <-> community communication have been heavily shaped by the difficulties of collectively fixing this (or even consistently recognizing it's a problem)
Add comment