User talk:(WT-en) IBobi Voyage Tips and guide

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Regarding [1], while I understand why you are removing discussions, the existing site policies are strongly aligned towards preventing any appearance of censorship - see Project:Using talk pages (talk page conversations are not deleted) - and most users of this site will have very strong opinions on the matter and see attempts to make exceptions to site policy as an abuse of power. Many of us felt it was inappropriate to use Wikitravel as a platform for discussions of forking when the Wikivoyage fork happened, and many will also feel it's inappropriate to use Wikitravel as a platform for a discussion of a fork now, but in both cases I think attempts to censor those discussions are greater wrongs and would ask that you restore the discussions you have deleted, perhaps adding a note that you feel that this is not the proper venue for such discussion to occur. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 17:38, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

Thank you, Ryan, that is a very reasonable proposition. However, as I have noted at Peter's Talk page, the discussion itself, in this particular case, serves the same destructive purpose to the community, as would touting a fork. You cannot discuss touting a fork without bringing attention to it, which is the point in the first place. Those who are attempting to discuss this are actively seeking to subvert the very site that allows them the platform upon which to discuss it. Perhaps there is no written policy that says "don't try to use Wikitravel to destroy Wikitravel," but that is only because it is self-evident.

In the case of Wikivoyage, absolutely that should not have been discussed here either. Two wrongs do not make a right, and there is no reason a prior grievous error should be used to justify another. I am acting in the best interest of this project, and I stand behind this action. If anyone has a resoned argument to refute that, fine. But we are not going to shoot ourselves in the face simply because explicit policy does not exist to tell us that would be a bad idea.--(WT-en) IBobi 17:49, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

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If you want to remove the links to the WM travel site discussion, I could agree to that. But outright censorship of others comments (like mine regarding how this should be discussed elsewhere not here!), is not just a real violation of our project's policies, it is counterproductive. I know well enough from experience that IB is best at alienating the communities whose sites they buy, rather than encouraging their growth. But really, continued edit warring, censorship, and other abuse is not the best way to present your argument that editors should stay here, if another fork emerges. Which is really what you should be doing, and doing fast.

As of right now, IB is moving from just being in violation of our advertising policy and consensus policies. You are in Project:How to handle unwanted edits territory. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 17:59, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

I believe it is within my rights as a member of this community to edit or revert edits as I see fit, is it not? Can you see that the absence of a policy forbidding fork discussion is detrimental to this site? So be it: let's write a policy. Here's my draft:

Discussions of forking the content of this Project are inappropriate and detrimental to Wikitravel. Anyone wishing to participate in such discussions is of course welcome to do so offline; but Wikitravel is under no obligation to provide a forum for self-destructive behavior.

Something like that? Meantime, since the discussion at hand deals directly with the policy above, I move that it be tabled until such time as the passage or defeat of such policy is decided.--(WT-en) IBobi 18:10, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

(edit conflicted) (WT-en) IBobi - I won't pursue this issue further, but please understand that deleting a good faith discussion, rather than responding and providing counter-arguments, is something that will be extremely poorly received within any wiki community. Again, using the example of Wikivoyage, using Wikitravel as a platform for discussing that fork was in poor taste, but attempts to censor those discussions would have been far worse than simply politely asking the individuals involved to raise their concerns in a more appropriate venue. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 18:13, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

"I believe it is within my rights as a member of this community to edit or revert edits as I see fit, is it not?". It is not. Reverting edits is not done as people see fit, it is done to preserve the integrity of our policies and rules. You are violating those rules, and Project:Edit war, which I suppose you did not read, directly responds to your current behavior. You are also reinforcing long-standing beliefs that Internet Brands will continue to disrespect the social norms and rules of the communities off which it makes its money.

Also, I think I told you privately at one point that I'm not likely to give you too much help, largely because I have found your comments on Shared arrogant, ignorant, and off-putting. In that same discussion I suggested you should heed Ryan's advice, as it is and will be spot-on, and more polite than my own. You have drawn way more attention to this fork through repeated defiance of policy. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 18:22, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

You assume incorrectly, Peter. I've read all policies concerning this site and simply disagree with you on this. As I've stated, had those comments been in good faith, I'd have left them be. They were not. I'd like it if you could, for the moment, leave off the repetition of stating yet again how much you dislike this site's host and myself, and focus constructively on the policy points I've made.

I propose as a mid-term solution: that while we discuss an "anti-fork discussion" policy, we reinstate the existing discussion, minus links to or mentions of an alternate site for such a fork (in this case MWF)? Will that serve the purpose you're after, Ryan & Peter?--(WT-en) IBobi 18:40, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

Updating site policies to prevent discussion of forks would probably be most appropriate if proposed at either Project:How to handle unwanted edits or Project:Using talk pages. As to whether restoring a discussion would "serve the purpose you're after", my purpose was simply to be consistent with the principles this site was founded on - open discussion and collaborative effort based on an agreed upon set of guidelines - and I felt it was important to point out that deletion of a good faith discussion, even one that may not be appropriate, was a very serious breach of wiki protocol. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 18:53, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

I might be amenable to a proposed policy to avoid discussion of forks in Wikitravel's public spaces. I would not, and I assume others would not, be amenable to your deleting other people's comments until said policy was agreed upon. Per Project:Consensus, which, if you have not read, you clearly have either not understood or simply disregarded in your actions and behavior, mandates that you would need others to agree with you before you take such inappropriate and impermissible action. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 19:01, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

Also, I've tried to make it clear that I think one could argue that the Project:External links policy would not allow links in the pub to a different travel wiki. You have been deleting my comments, though, so that may have been lost. So yes, I think it would be acceptable to restore all comments as made, minus the links. Scrubbing mentions of the Wikimedia Foundation would not be appropriate, because we do not edit others' words on this site, to avoid people trying to obscure and change other peoples' intended meanings. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 19:06, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

From your points of view, what would constitute a comment NOT made "in good faith" in this case? What purpose, other than an attempt to subvert Wikitravel by fracturing its community -- decidedly not "in good faith" -- does a fork discussion serve? This is way beyond "not in good taste," which basically is meaningless if it is not grounded in policy. There may be members of this community who also have interests outside of this community; but when those interest clearly and directly conflict with the good of this community, there needs to be a WT way of dealing with that, other than simply looking the other way and calling them "distasteful."--(WT-en) IBobi 19:16, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

I think that discussion is outside the scope of a user talk page discussion and should probably be posted in a place where others can contribute. I'd suggest reposting in Project:How to handle unwanted edits. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 19:25, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

[edit conflict] I'm happy to explain this via open discussion, but I'm not sure that's what you seem to want...

My comments, which you removed, were to the point of avoiding using Wikitravel's public spaces as a platform to advertise other websites, especially those that could be viewed (wrongly) as competition. I suggested more appropriate venues. I can't fathom how you would think that is somehow in bad faith. Unlike your transparently interested removal of others' comments.

I can understand your reaction to Jani's post, and I can even understand how, from the perspective of an interested party employed by Internet Brands, it might seem to be not in good faith. But Jani was trying to alert the Wikitravel community—a community which he helped build—that every last admin active on this site has stated that they are going to fork, if the project does get started. While you have dismissed my comments as chicken little saying the "sky is falling," this is a fact. That is something rather of interest to this community, no? If members of this community, which includes even those who are here because they are paid to be here, want to join a discussion to express their disapproval of the proposed Wikimedia project, they should have a chance to do so.

In my view, which I have stated many times, is that IB has grossly mismanaged the Wikitravel website and its community. This is what has been destructive to our community, nothing else. Forking seems to me the best possible thing that could happen to our community, and for crowd-sourced travel writing in general. I have already stated so on Shared and in private communication with you. I even think it might be good for the quality of the IB-owned Wikitravel! Maybe it will force IB to wake up and take stewardship of this site and its community seriously. Make a case for why people should stay in words and deeds. Actually fix the bugs, improve site performance, take feature development seriously, govern more openly, respect the wishes and polices of the community. This would be great. I have no way to know whether the WMF proposal has been the spur behind increased tech support from IB, or the lack of progress on the booking tool that none of us want. But I do believe and say, in good faith, that the proposed fork will be good for the Wikitravel community, and that it has already brought semi-retired editors and admins who had lost interest, as the site stagnated, back to writing, editing, patrolling, and so on. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 19:36, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

It was not your comments I was per se disagreeing with, Peter; it was Jani's post. It does not. Belong. On Wikitravel. Your post in reply to his became moot, once his was removed (just as your reply to me is now moot, since the original post has been restored -- you should consider removing it). If we need a policy to remove fork discussions, and prevent more of the same from occurring in the future, we'll do that. For now, as both you and Ryan have objected, I have removed the links pending our policy draft.

The "Wikitravel community" is not the same as "the Wikitravel admins," which you mistake as being equal. In fact, the community at large positively dwarfs the small number of hard-working admins that patrol and curate the site out of the goodness of their hearts and desire to see the project flourish. There are *seven million* human beings every month who use this site. The majority of them have never been here before. THAT is the community; that is the basis of "the traveler comes first." Perhaps admins say they support a fork; maybe that fork will happen; maybe it'll even be supported by the WMF, despite what a terrible precedent that sets; does that mean it should be discussed here? To what end? This is not a forum for discussing how to dismantle this project, nor will it become one. If you wish to discuss a fork and its proposed benefits to the 40 admins who support it, in defiance of the 7 million monthly travelers who come here for the best content, by all means, talk about it. Not here. "We talked about Wikivoyage before" is not a rationale for repeating the same mistake again.

As for "fix the bugs, improve site performance, take feature development seriously, govern more openly, respect the wishes and polices of the community," if you want to go back a year, two years, five years, sure. But you and I both know that over the past year plus, everything has changed for the better. And to state that the idea of the WMF supporting a fork has spurred anything is ludicrous; the timing refutes that notion, since the start of the upgrade alone predates the involvement of WMF by at least 3 months. With all due respect, it's disingenuous to keep repeating things that occurred in the past as though they were still happening. You can see on a daily basis how much work is going into this project, very much including this long discussion between us on the fork issue today.--(WT-en) IBobi 20:35, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

An additional note - the principle of discouraging, but not censoring, potentially disruptive discussions is a longstanding one. For example, search for "fork" on Project:Internet Brands, and see the various FAQs linked from User:(WT-en) Hansm as well as his contributions elsewhere on the site, all of which go way beyond a brief blurb in the Pub. Those still editing on Wikitravel today disagreed with Hans, and most of us thought it was highly inappropriate of him to use Wikitravel to advocate for a fork, but so long as his discussions consisted of questioning site policy or summarizing his reasoning, he was given the right to express an opinion. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 19:56, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

Without the 40 admins, you won't have the best content to attract millions of visitors each month, and without attracting a completely new community of admins -- completely impossible at your current level of support -- you won't even be able to keep the content you have clean and organized. I find it completely ridiculous to claim that we 40 or so admin are "in defiance of a 7-million-strong community". That is ludicrous. We are the ones who care most about this place, and if you can't keep us happy, how are you going to keep happy all those supposedly-millions-of casual users who don't even care as much as we do? (Granted, you'll be able to keep the spiders and spambots very happy.) Realistically, those 7 million hits will follow the content and the 40 admins who keep it clean right off into the sunset. Instead of repeating your claim that Wikitravel has a vibrant community without us, you need to wake up and realize that IB needs a massive fundamental change in the way they deal with this site-- needed it years earlier in fact, and much more thorough a change than simply updating MediaWiki for once.(WT-en) texugo 21:10, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

Bottom line, I think, is that you still don't trust the only few dozen people who actually do follow every in and out of this site, and you still don't believe us when we tell you that IB's level of support is far, far lower than what is actually needed to keep a healthy, productive, and open wiki running.(WT-en) texugo 21:14, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

Who ever claimed that Wikitravel has a vibrant community without its admins? I claimed the exact opposite: that everyone iss needed here to keep WT awesome. That's the whole, entire point of my objection to this fork discussion, do you not get it? I'm not sure you've been paying attention to the site over the last year, but if you have requests for what you want done, you ought to voice them; they've been getting addressed at breakneck pace for everyone who speaks up :) --(WT-en) IBobi 21:24, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

The fact that you do not know whether I have been here all year making requests speaks volumes.(WT-en) texugo 21:30, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

I'm sorry, Tex, I don't see them: http://shared.wikitravel.org/wiki/Roadmap Where have you made these requests that have gone unanswered?--(WT-en) IBobi 21:36, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

The Roadmap has traditionally been used for feature requests that involve, as the page says, "expansion, development, and improvement" of the site, so I haven't included anything there. Try looking at wts:Category:Open bug reports and you'll find requests like wts:WtTech:Breadcrumbs don't work on pt:, wts:WtTech:Listing templates don't work on es:, wts:WtTech:Mobile site fixes, and others.(WT-en) texugo 21:50, 2 July 2012 (EDT)

Texugo, your input, like that of all the other admins, has been invaluable in testing the new 1.17 upgrade. But to point to two bugs you reported a week ago -- both of which have been responded to and are either fixed or in-progress -- and say you've been ignored all year making tech requests? That's just unfair. All I'm asking is that we be given credit for the work we've been doing as the hosts of this site, instead of dwelling on years ago when tech requests were not being addressed in a timely manner. Otherwise, why are we talking? Thanks for your remarks.--(WT-en) IBobi 13:22, 3 July 2012 (EDT)

To my knowledge, none of the 3 bugs I just mentioned have been fixed or even acknowledged with a response from IB (Later edit:To be fair, I have just discovered that instructions to resolve one of these issues was indeed given, not on the tech request page I made for it, but on another talk page where someone else brought up a related problem on another language version), but that is beside the point, which is that even the somewhat increased involvement of IB of late has been of nowhere near sufficient volume or promptness, and I have no reason to believe that they won't return to total neglect once they fix the upgrade bugs enough to meet their monetization goal of getting their dreaded booking bar running. I am not disparaging the job you have done, which has certainly been better than your predecessors, but you are still just a liaison between us and the techs and have the unenviable role of breaking bad tidings to the community when IB ham-fistedly goes against the community's wishes. If IB got a couple of people in here who actually enjoyed doing what we do, who contributed, edited, patrolled, joined in policy discussions, participated in community decision-making in a true Wiki spirit, and really dug into the nitty-gritty of it all along with the rest of us, maybe IB might have a better understanding of the way this community works, and the community would undoubtedly have more respect for IB appearing to actually care about anything besides dollar signs.(WT-en) texugo 13:56, 3 July 2012 (EDT)

As an aside, I've given my opinion at Project:How to handle unwanted edits. I was unaware of this whole fork-process until that note in the Pub, but I agree you removing comments there is not right. As an IB employee, I think you should be extra hesitant with such matters. However, I understand the "why" and I wanted to say I applaud your personal efforts to do things right. At least, it always seems that way to me. I imagine it's no fun to balance between the demands of an unhappy wiki community and the business interests of your employer. In the current situation, they just don't seem to overlap much. The fact that even in the heat of potential crisis you at least try to work through the wiki ways of policy making, deserves credit, even though I oppose the proposal. Good night! (WT-en) Justme 18:33, 3 July 2012 (EDT)

Hi! Your account is effected by the spambot issue [2]. I assume good faith that you are not teaming up with the bots. When do you think you solve this issue? (WT-en) Jc8136 09:34, 24 July 2012 (EDT)

The MW 1.17.2 patch was deployed early this morning Pacific time. Please let me know as soon as possible if it has not addressed the spambot issue and the deletion problem.--(WT-en) IBobi talk email 13:15, 24 July 2012 (EDT)