English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout/Post-mortem

• Google advising us on how to prevent harm to rankings (comment from Jorm) Risker 03:21, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please clarify - does this mean the decision to replace the full blackout by a javascript-only blackout? Boud 16:09, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • My understanding is that the decision to do a JS/CSS blackout, as opposed to changing the HTML, was made prior to the communication with Google. -- Tim Starling 18:21, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• See separate page for media mentions
• Requests for interviews responded to chapter execs and members, WMF board, WMF staff Risker

• See separate page for activities by other WMF communities
• WP Staff identified the need for a final focused conversation and implemented it (in a flawed, but effective version). Philippe (WMF) 04:16, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(WMF Handling to include things like the responsiveness of Legal team, etc., for example.) Gyoung 05:27, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Extensive single-threading through a few staff left a lot of volunteers flailing trying to help because they were unable to self-serve. Important issues had to be repeated many times in order to catch the right person's attention. (partially helped by the etherpad but it was underutilized for gathering clearly important trouble reports)
• Mediawiki needs to develop some kind of etherpad extension, or have one running on the site. While we might not use it for general editing, we badly need an in-house collaborative live text editor, with a panel at the side for live collaborative dialog about the live text, and the ability to have multiple docs grouped together being worked on by the same people.
  • We do have an etherpad (etherpad:) ~~EBE123~~ ^talk_Contribs 11:05, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Longer lead-up times with better initial planning. Pulling this off in the time frame available was monumental, but it could have gone better with only an extra week of time.--Jorm (WMF) 06:14, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Simple english got hit with the blackout (why?)
  • The technical reason is bug 25591. We actually knew about this going into it[1] and I thought we had this covered.[2] I visited the Simple English Wikipedia during the blackout and didn't see the blackout overlay. How long were they affected by the blackout? Kaldari 08:37, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Around an hour? It seemed from IRC that jamesofur fixed it. ���SJ talk | translate   16:56, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Could probably have been much clearer about what was and what wasn't open for long-term discussion (esp. re: blackout screen designs). Things that were not intended to be "call for entries" were assumed as such.--Jorm (WMF) 06:13, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Early discussions which started December 10th began on Jimmy's talk, which despite garnering lots of responses, could not be used to declare consensus of any kind. Starting a proper RFC earlier would have meant less WMF involvement would have been needed to generate an unequivocal consensus for a blackout. Steven Walling • talk 06:24, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Having a pool of community facilitators who work on this sort of task regularly might have helped here -- it's a slightly different set of considerations than mediation or arbitration. Processes like a standard summary notice in the next week's Signpost (or the equivalent on the sister-project/language-project in question) would be useful. With pratice we could define a better cross-wiki announcement system for such things as well. –SJ talk | translate   16:56, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• List of important messages needed, so people can get working on them, and drafts need lining up earlier so they are believed ready to go 24 hrs before, allows a last review "the next day"
• In focusing on on-wiki consensus, we forgot to post to the English Wikipedia mailing list which some were unhappy about. -- Steven Walling • talk 06:22, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Inadequate supply of prefab press-release grade material left reporters mostly riffing off a single somewhat unfortunate AP article. (We had old ones which were mostly still applicable, but they weren't easily found and were not updated)
• Insufficient access to clearly spoken interview subjects left many articles without quotes from 'our side' (there are some exceptions, but where people were actually interviewed things went well)

• More effort to involve the larger En.wp community in the discussions at an earlier point. Risker 03:25, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Banners pointing to RFC should have been global from the time the RFC started Risker 03:25, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• RFC Close should have made mention of the extensive discussion that occurred prior to the !vote (and I say that as the person who wrote much of the closing statement) Risker 03:25, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Super-user editing of wikipedia was generally good, see this table on my talk page for the five edits I believed were problematic due to happening during an edit lock. (All editors were highly collegial regarding this, and all edits were otherwise good edits). Fifelfoo 06:36, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• With respect to this, I think we would need some advance decisions and published guidance on how to deal with potentially injurious vandalism discovered during a blackout, particularly if content is still fully visible to mobile users. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) 11:58, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• I recollect seeing a number of BLP and copyright related edits made during the blackout, and didn't make any note of them as they appeared to be activities connected with Oversighters, Stewards or Staff's responsibility due to their role. Responding to edits with legal consequences seemed sensible, even when otherwise locked against editing. Fifelfoo 12:24, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• What constitutes legally actionable vandalism is obviously open to interpretation. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) 13:07, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Maybe consider removing all the permissions, not just the editing ones, with the possible exception of suppression from Oversighters. I know that some editors, simply for the sake of exploring and with no ill will at all, changed permissions around; while they had no ill effects, there was a bit of hard feelings about it. Risker 06:49, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• There seems to be some low level generic ill-will regarding edits or changes conducted during the black-out. I didn't address permissions fiddling or css templates in user-space as these didn't relate to the consensus as closed. Fifelfoo 12:24, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• I strongly agree with Risker here, and made the suggestion before the blackout that certain user groups (especially the oversight group) should be whitelisted. It complicates matters when editing is left open to a user group which is generally unconnected to the project. Most stewards didn't mind helping out (although some understandably didn't want anything to do with it), but it would have been more appropriate for a local user group to have access for these emergency purposes. It turned out not to be much of an issue but for the future, it would be great if the stewards were not the only volunteer users allowed to edit. Thanks, PeterSymonds (talk) 13:07, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Better zip code data for the CongressLookup extension. Sadly, most of the publicly available data is spotty or outdated, but if we had had a few extra days we could have spent more time vetting the data and given people more accurate information on their representatives. Kaldari 08:44, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  A request to pass upstream? Here, perhaps the Sunlight Foundation. –SJ talk | translate   16:56, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]