Looking ahead to recommendations: who has credibility/authority to move them forward?

I can't speak for others, but I've not felt any concerns about the ability of the team on this page to develop a brief number of insightful and pivotal key recommendations.

Ummm. What worries me here is that all of our deliberations may end up pointless - few will read them, and nobody will act on them. Creating another body to implement them smacks of even more bureaucracy (and I do think that we already have too much of it). What I'd like to see is a short, simple (KISS) set of recommendations, in as simple language as possible, that would be widely advertised by the WMF. But no, we cannot and should not force anybody to accept them; we don't have a mandate for that. The Board, on the other hand, does, and what the Board wants to do with our recommendation is, well, up to the Board. Our goal is to make it as useful as possible (and I'll stress it again - useful usually has a high positive correlation with KISS).

That was me. Hey, I found another thing to bitch about w/ regards to liquid threads - apparently I cannot edit it to replace my IP with my name. I really, really, really hate LT.

Well, no, that would be re-attributing a contribution. :)

But you can edit the post and make a note that it was you.

I submitted that as a request to change LT, a while back.

This is interesting. I just came to the same conclusion as Sue Gardner, before she posted it. My own idea was we should form some kind of lobbying group/wiki-party pushing for quality improvement on a meta scale. Things we should lobby for:

• • We should push for a 'brand', which must contain the basic aspects of quality;
  • We should advertise, stimulate and teach these aspects of quality on as many Wikimedia projects as possible;
  • We should push for more statistical research specifically directed at these aspects of quality and then address the question what proposals/systems stimulate these aspects best;
  • We should push for more guidance and teaching of new or otherwise inexperienced contributors;
  • We should push for a technical addition that enables feedback for articles and talk page contributions;
  • We should push for admins to be more active in battling rude, demotivating behaviour.
  • We should push for a 'senior editor' status to be created to give quality users more influence in wiki-politics and more authority in discussions;
  • We should push for measures that keep the not-understanding-but-wanting-to-comment types out of discussions;
  • We should push for wikiprojects to function at a meta scale; apart from sharing specialist knowledge, such groups should create lists of the universal information that all Wikipedias should have.

All of these things have already been discussed by this task force. As a first step, we could take the most practical/realistic four points and make them our four recommendations for January. We should then continue to pursue our goals by creating a group page at meta, attracting more contributors that care for quality from as many different projects as possible. Together, we could make a wiki-wide difference for quality.

I think we should also recognize that these things are directed at very different target audience: some at communities, some at specific groups of users (e.g. sysops), some at developers, some at external audience, some of them might require some discussion by the Council.