[Foundation-l] Self-determination of language versions in questions of skin?

[William Pietri]

On 07/03/2010 06:11 PM, David Gerard wrote:
>> That's phrased in terms of dominance. It's in effect asking who's the
>> bigger monkey. I think that's a conversation worth avoiding where possible.
>>      
>
> The dominance element was brought in, as you well know, by Trevor
> Parscal's preremptory reversion of the removal of the collapsed list.
> The dominance was, as you well know, already blatantly exercised. The
> question now is what defences are possible.
>    

Honestly, I've only followed this casually, so I've lost track of who 
exactly did what. But "X did it first" is a weak argument. As far as I 
can tell, this is jusjt another Wrong Version situation.

> Please, stop trying to obfuscate.
>    

I'm not trying to obfuscate. I just think power jockeying is a giant 
waste of time when everybody's allegedly on the same side -- and given 
our mission, I think we are. This is less a participant's opinion about 
community/foundation relations, and more my professional opinion about 
how to handle design questions in modern, highly iterative software 
development projects.

Many of the people doing well at this are intensely data-driven. 
YouTube, for example, uses four major independent sources of data to 
inform design hypotheses, and then they rigorously split-test all 
proposed changes to monitor impacts on a host of key metrics. They 
tinker relentlessly, running dozens of experiments in parallel and 
releasing at least weekly. They only give new designs significant 
traffic when they've found a measurable improvement.

Wikipedia, given its open, do-ocractic nature, shouldn't be less 
data-focused than places like that. We should be striving to be leaders, 
not 5 years behind best practice. In my view, arguing over who's the 
biggest monkey, and therefore therefore gets to pick which Wrong Version 
we settle on, is just a big distraction from actual productive work. 
Large corporations can afford that sort of waste, but I don't think a 
mission-driven one should tolerate it.

William