Risker,
I find myself unconvinced by your argumentation as I perceive it as
inconsistent.
On the one hand, you suggest that before we enable the option to access
data from Wikidata using either Lua or a parser function should be
discussed and decided by the community beforehand - the same community,
that has been informed since mid 2011 that this change is coming. You
suppose that the community can actually come together and decide this
globally.
On the other hand, you are not trusting the community with the use of the
same feature. You say they would "weaponize" the feature, that the
community will be unable to adapt to the new feature, and that it needs to
discuss first how to use it, and for deployment to wait a few months (I do
not fully understand why you assume that a few months will be enough to
sort things out). You seem to assume that a wiki as large and active as the
English Wikipedia is not resilient enough to absorb the rather minor
technical change we are introducing.
It is, technically, a minor change. Socially it can lead to bigger changes
-- but I found it hard to believe that anyone can predict the actual effect
on the English Wikipedia community. This has to be seen and experienced,
and I, for one, trust the English Wikipedia community to be as awesome as
always, and to absorb and use this new features in ways no one has even
imagined yet.
Also, to come back to the issue of deploying unmature code to Wikipedia:
this is absolutely intentional. You say you want a mature system to be
deployed on Wikipedia, not one in its infancy. I would ask you to
reconsider that wish. I have been there: we have developed Semantic
MediaWiki (SMW), with the intention to push it to the Wikipedias, and the
system became highly usable and extremely helpful. Be it NASA, Yu-Gi-Oh
fans, or the Wikimedia Foundation, SMW has found hundreds of uses and tens
of thousands of users. And SMW got better and better for these use case --
to the expense of getting less and less probable to be deployed on the
Wikipedias.
I would prefer to avoid this mistake a second time. Deploy early, deploy
often - and listen closely to the feedback of the users and analyse the
actual usage numbers. MZMcBride raises a number of very real issues that
need to be tackled soon (I disagree that they are blockers, but I agree
that they are important, and we are working on them). This was so far quite
successful on Wikidata itself, and also for what we have deployed to the
Wikipedias so far.
In all seriousness: thank you for your concerns. Having read carefully, I
find that I do not share them and that I see not sufficient reason to delay
deployment out of the points you mention.
A few minor comments inline in your mail below.
2013/4/8 Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com>
On 6 April 2013 17:27, Denny Vrandečić
<denny.vrandecic(a)wikimedia.de>
wrote:
Or, put differently, the Wikidata proposal has
been published nearly two
years ago. We have communicated on all channels for more than one year. I
can hardly think of any technical enhancement of Wikipedia - ever - which
was communicated as strongly beforehand as Wikidata. If, in that time,
the
community has not managed to discuss the topic,
it might be because such
changes only get discussed effectively after they occur.
"All channels" isn't really correct, although I can respect how difficult
it is to try to find a way to communicate effectively with the English
Wikipedia community.
I do not recall ever reading about Wikidata on
Wiki-en-L (the English
Wikipedia mailing list), and only rarely on Wikimedia-L (mainly to invite
people to meetings on IRC, but less than 5% of English Wikipedians use
IRC).
We have been on Signpost several times, we have been on the village pump.
This is considered sufficient on the other Wikipedias.
A search over the mailing list archives shows that both lists you mentioned
had discussions about Wikidata. They contained links to pretty
comprehensive pages on Meta. There are pages inside of the English
Wikipedia discussing Wikidata. Furthermore, we had reached out in many
talks, e.g. at the last two Wikimanias, but also in smaller local events,
and always supported Wikipedians to talk about it in their local
communities.
Since you are saying that our communication has not been sufficient, I
would be very glad to hear which channels we have missed so that we can add
them in the future.
Since Wikidata
phase 2 is actually a less intrusive change than phase 1,
and based on the effectiveness of the discussion about phase 2 on the
English Wikipedia so far, I think that a post-deployment discussion is
the
right way to go.
In what way is this less intrusive? Phase 1 changed the links to other
projects beside articles, a task that was almost completely done by bots,
and did not in any way affect the ability to edit or to modify the content
of the articles. Phase 2 is intended to directly affect content and the
manner in which it is edited.
It is less intrusive on in the sense that simply nothing happens until an
editor consciously decides to do something, i.e. use the new functionality.
As well, phase 2 (dependent on implementation)
requires that an editor go
to a different website to modify the information on an article. There is no
warning to the editor that they are leaving Wikipedia. And with the
challenges that are about to happen with Firefox (the browser that is
possibly the most commonly used by Wikipedians), we know that SUL is
probably not going to work properly. Editors thinking they are logged in
to English Wikipedia will find themselves on a strange site, not logged in,
with a completely foreign editing interface. This is not the way to
attract new editors, nor is it the way to keep existing ones.
I would like on which you base this last sentence. Our user feedback so far
has more often used the term "addictive" than "strange". Also the
numbers -
about 7000 active editors, more than 100,000 edits by human editors - speak
a different language. But if you have anything to support your statement, I
would be extremely interested in them.
Also, a very
important consideration is raised by Phoebe: Wikidata is in
its current form still in its infancy, and for a well developed project
like the English Wikipedia this means that the actual usage (and effect)
is
expected to be minimal in the current stage. The
deployment of phase 2
this
week would merely be a start for an organic
co-evolution of Wikidata and
the Wikipedias in the months and years to come.
Yes, it's in its infancy. It needs to be put through its paces and problems
identified and resolved. You already have a fairly significant number of
projects willing to do that. Keep working with them. Why is there this
insistence on putting software that is not ready for use onto projects that
haven't indicated any interest in using immature software?
You seem to assume that the eleven Wikipedias currently using Wikidata
phase 2 have asked us for a deployment. This was not the case (besides on
Hungarian). They were informed that they would be the first Wikipedias to
experience the roll out. This lead to several conversations, just as on the
English Wikipedia as well.
But this can only happen 'in the wild', as a
priori debates about the
possible usages of such features will remain not
only too speculative,
but
also highly undemocratic due to the minimal
engagement of the community
in
advance.
This is possibly the most disturbing thing I have ever read on a Wikimedia
mailing list. You want to put software onto the most developed project in
the entire Wikimedia community without any indication that the project is
supportive of what it is intended to do, knowing that it is not actually
ready for use at this point, knowing that its functions are directly in
conflict with one of the project's known priorities of attracting new
editors and retaining existing ones....and then you have the nerve to say
that discussing how to use it would be "undemocratic"? The minimal
engagement of the community in advance is the reason that deploying this
software now is undemocratic.
I am sorry to have disturbed you so deeply, but I remain with my statement:
based on the small engagement in this discussion, compared to the size of
the English Wikipedia community, I regard this discussion as undemocratic,
i.e. not representative of the editor body as a whole.
Do not misunderstand me: I am not claiming that the decision to switch on
Wikidata has been democratic, or actually indeed that technical decisions
in the Wikimedia Movement are in general achieved through democratic
processes. I am merely noticing that I do not consider the current
discussion to be any more democratic than that - I do not think that the
community is represented here any better (or worse) than in the many
channels we have used for communication before.
Cheers,
Denny
--
Project director Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 |
http://wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.