Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
> This is a interesting proposal, but I'd suggest taking the idea to Meta. There is already a
> Symptom checker at WebMD, but it could potentially upon a legal can of worms for WM to get
> involved in medical troubleshooting.
There may already be online troubleshooting wizards for a domain (e.g.
medicare), and people have to memorize the domain names of these
domain-specific troubleshooting wizards. What I propose is a single,
universal entry point for all your troubles in life --
WikiTroubleshooting.org, so that you don't need to memorize individual
sites like WebMD. It's like with Wikipedia -- if you want to learn
about something, you just go to a single website: wikipedia.org,
without learning about domain-specific knowledgebase websites.
Best Regards,
Yao Ziyuan
http://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/
Possible names: WikiTroubleshooting/WikiWizard/WikiWiz/WikiSolve/WikiFix/...
Motivation:
Wikipedia provides factual knowledge (e.g. 7th-grade geometry) but not
problem-solving capabilities (e.g. helping a visitor solve his
geometry problem).
Solution:
A hypertext system like a wiki can implement a step-by-step wizard (as
seen in Windows XP's Troubleshooter help system; screenshot:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/i/tr/cms/contentPics/multimon-e.gif)
that lets a visitor incrementally select symptoms of his problem, and
finally the wizard leads to a wiki page that shows possible causes for
and solutions to his problem. Any problem in life can be included in
this wiki. For example, the visitor can start at a "Troubleshooting
Your Health Problem" portal, and the portal lets the visitor select a
body part that feels uncomfortable, and subsequent wizard pages let
him select more specific symptoms, until enough symptoms are specified
so that a final wizard page can show possible diseases and their
causes and solutions. Like Wikipedia, WikiTroubleshooting should cite
credible references.
Best Regards,
Yao Ziyuan
http://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/
These are great questions, and we're actually having a big meeting about
the project this afternoon, so I'll be sure to raise them to make sure
we all have the same notion. That said, a few of quick responses from my
perspective:
On 05/03/2010 08:15 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
> Since it does seem very close to going live, could I ask if plans have
> been made for how to handle announcing the arrival of this feature and
> any post-implementation problems? Hopefully there won't be any or
> many, but are there plans ranging from "rollback completely if things
> go awfully wrong" to "make adjustments as needed and be responsive to
> concerns raised"?
>
There's the technical part of this and the community part of this. My
understanding is that the technical side of the rollout is well
understood, and that our substantial time in the labs environment means
we are not expecting major problems. I also am given to believe that if
there are major problems, rolling back will not be a big deal.
That will get us to having the feature enabled, but not in use. That
next leg is mainly up to the community. Once the software is enabled,
any admin will be able to turn on flagged protection for any page, just
as they are now able to turn on full protection. I expect there will be
a period of experimentation and vigorous discussion to discover exactly
when that is a good idea.
Once it's in use on particular pages, there's the question of who does
the reviewing, how much is needed, and how we make sure it gets done in
a timely fashion. Most of that is up to the community as well, and part
of the purpose of this experiment is to figure that out as well. From a
technical perspective, there are a couple different approaches to
deciding who has reviewer powers; in the next week or so I want to start
a community discussion on the right model, but we need a little more
internal discussion to be able to clearly present those options.
As far as the "making adjustments as needed", the plan is that we will
absolutely learn things after release, and some of those things will
probably require code changes. There is also a list of nice-to-haves
that we can do if nothing else more pressing comes up. So work will
continue as before, with frequent releases either to production or to
the labs environment as appropriate. Once that work tapers off, I'm sure
there will be a discussion of where best to allocate resources, but that
hasn't even been mentioned yet; the Foundation is definitely committed
to supporting this experiment.
> And how much input exactly will ordinary editors have
> post-implementation? Is the interface flexible and can be changed by
> editors or admins, and which bits can only be tweaked by developers
> (either using common sense or following a community poll or Bugzilla
> request or request somewhere else)? I ask this partly as someone who
> (with others) may have to deal with any massive disputes or edit wars
> that break out over this if some aspects of flagged revisions or its
> interface are editable and changeable on-wiki (presumably in the
> Mediawiki namespace, editable by admins only).
>
This is an area where I'm personally a bit ignorant, so I'll be sure to
ask. I know that some parts of the interface definitely require a
developer to change code and release it. I know that some, possibly all
purely textual changes can in theory be done hot, but I don't know who
has the mojo to do that on the English Wikipedia. If somebody here knows
that, please speak up.
> Presumably, an update will be made to the on-wiki pages about this
> before it goes live? And there will some site notice giving some
> warning? having things change mid-edit could be a bit disconcerting!
>
My belief, which I will double-check, is that releasing the software
will have little or no impact on the editing experience; it's only when
an admin activates it on a particular page via the protection interface
that the editing experience will change.
William
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
> Since it does seem very close to going live, could I ask if plans have
> been made for how to handle announcing the arrival of this feature and
> any post-implementation problems? Hopefully there won't be any or
> many, but are there plans ranging from "rollback completely if things
> go awfully wrong" to "make adjustments as needed and be responsive to
> concerns raised"?
>
> And how much input exactly will ordinary editors have
> post-implementation? Is the interface flexible and can be changed by
> editors or admins, and which bits can only be tweaked by developers
> (either using common sense or following a community poll or Bugzilla
> request or request somewhere else)? I ask this partly as someone who
> (with others) may have to deal with any massive disputes or edit wars
> that break out over this if some aspects of flagged revisions or its
> interface are editable and changeable on-wiki (presumably in the
> Mediawiki namespace, editable by admins only).
>
> I think the ability for the community of editors and admins to make
> such changes to the interface is a *good* thing, but want to be clear
> exactly what is changeable and by whom, and if off-wiki requests are
> needed, where to make them, and making this location and the whole
> roll-out clear to people via on-wiki notices.
>
> Presumably, an update will be made to the on-wiki pages about this
> before it goes live? And there will some site notice giving some
> warning? having things change mid-edit could be a bit disconcerting!
>
> Carcharoth
>
These are good points. I'm cc'ing this to foundation-l, as the
Foundation is taking the primary role in rolling this out to the
English Wikipedia (or at least, has been). Maybe William and Erik can
comment on what the expectations are for the extension's
documentation, and what sort of delay we can expect between the coming
development end point and live access on en.wp? Does the WMF plan to
follow the trial roll out described on community pages there, or
something else?
Nathan
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:01 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Can anyone remind me what the per day and per month post limits are,
> and confirm that someone is still keeping track?
>
> We've established in the past that a collegial atmosphere is desired
> by the people who post to and read this list. Some have never agreed,
> but that is why some have previously been moderated. Limits and
> moderation have been the only tools effective against those who can't
> find the energy to be nice; reason has never worked, though it has
> been deployed at each opportunity. Let's use the tools at hand, and
> avoid sidetracking useful discussion with meta problems.
>
30 posts per month. No one has come close to hitting the limit in at least
a few months.
We didn't go with a per-day limit because there are times when posting 6 or
7 times in a day is fine - for example, when we've got a few constructive
threads going at once. When it becomes problematic is when you're doing a
back-and-forth that's getting heated. And I guess what I would say to that
is, if you're posting in a thread that's becoming a little heated,
particularly one that you've posted in already, maybe you should hold off on
sending your e-mail for a few hours. Then, you can decide whether you
really want to send that e-mail - with the added benefit of giving others
time to cool down as well. But I don't think you could set a per-day limit
that would be effective without being restrictive.
As for moderation, I think that we've tried to apply a light touch,
particularly given that the atmosphere has seemed to improve over the last
few months. That said, if moderation is necessary, then we'll do so.
--
[[User:Ral315]]
Hello all!
This is my first time on any Wikimedia mailing list, so please forgive me if
I'm actually posting on the wrong list or something.
I'm a programmer, and recently I've been using a nice little service, which
is run by a few independent programmers. The trouble is that it's a kind of
service which potential users would like to know that it will be maintained
well for a few years in the future, and these independent programmers can't
guarantee something like that. Then I thought, this project has a spirit
similar to Wikimedia's projects, so maybe Wikimedia would want to adopt it
or sponsor it? I think it will require little maintenance effort.
Do note that this project is not a wiki exactly.
I have not yet said what this project it, cause I'm not even sure I'm on the
right mailing list. Is this a good place to discuss this matter?
(Also, please 'cc' me in any replies, because I don't get mail delivered
from this list.)
Best Wishes,
Ram Rachum.
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
We continue to work on UI display issues and on getting up a Labs
version of the German Wikipedia. We're pretty close to release, and we
believe only minor UI issues remain.
If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
To see the in-progress and upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker,
under Current and Backlog:
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William
