Media Viewer software is not ready
Last month, I wrote an open letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, inviting others to join me in a simple but important request: roll back the recent actions—both technical and social—by which the Wikimedia Foundation has overruled legitimate decisions of several Wikimedia projects.
The context of the letter has been discussed in many venues, including the Signpost. In summary: Three of Wikimedia's most substantial projects clearly and formally rejected the full deployment of the Wikimedia Foundation's Media Viewer software, and declared that the deployment should be scaled back. The WMF disagreed, and created both technical ("superprotect") and social obstacles to those projects' decisions. In the letter, we requested, and continue to request, that the Wikimedia Foundation remove those obstacles.
I hoped that, if I contacted those who had previously spoken up on the topic, and diligently pursued my friends and close colleagues, I might earn as many as 200 signatures in a month, and thereby deliver a clear, strong message.
The response was astonishing.
In less than a month, the letter has been signed by 824 Wikimedians. An additional 82 people signed a copy of the letter published on change.org, totalling more than 900 supporters.
Numbers like these are, to my knowledge, without precedent; no previous Wikimedia issue has ever garnered 800 supporters. Votes on the US SOPA/PIPA legislation, on allowing proprietary video formats, and for individual appointments to the Board of Trustees have numbered in the hundreds, but none of these surpassed 800.
