No subject

Barnstars. But I am getting off topic.

The other thing that has grated is this: for the most part us editors
appreciate developer attention (and we do not show that enough, sorry).
However English Wikipedia is also strongly *independent *and makes its own
decisions. Major changes to how the software works, or to the UI (especially
if it affects the social infrastructure too) is instantly controversial and
should be discussed with the community.

Very little discussion ocurrred r.e. rolling this out. For example no trial
was offered, no "Request for Comment" was taken to guage community opinion.
I know these are our processes and a significant part of the blame lies with
the editors - but even so announcement of the feature suddenly seemed to
"appear"on-wiki the day before :) (that may not be an accurate picture - but
for most that is how it appeared).

It was only *after* deployment that is was explained that the extension is
amazing customisable on-wiki (a really thoughtful idea. You guys need to
write more extensions like this, awesome stuff). So, more miscommunication.

This comes to the crux of the issue; I think the feature probably will be
accepted by the community, with some tweaking. But communication issues have
turned some people heavily against it (mostly, I suspect, because they
genuinely feel no one was able to give feedback prior to roll out).

I've seen this happen before numerous times - Wiki does something. Or a dev
does something. There is miscommunication and people who would probably see
eye-to-eye are growling at each other across tables. The established Wiki
editors feel put out and the developers feel under-appreciated (did I
mention: WikiLove guys!). [Ironically *the same problem* is a big part of
the editor retention issue on-wiki]

It comes down to a lack of understanding of the processes, attitudes and
"languages" involved in both the developer and wiki communities.

So the question that this leads me to is this: what can we do to improve
communication between these two groups. How can we vocalize the communities
thoughts, ideas and independence. How do we get the creativity and
versatility of the developers in front of the community.

Do we need some sort of group to cross this boundary and focus on smoothing
out these hiccups?

Fire away :)

Tom




On 1 July 2011 03:45, Howie Fung <hfung at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Everyone,
>
> Earlier today, we deployed WikiLove Extension [1] to the English Wikipedia.
> We also made some minor changes to the Article Feedback Tool as well.
>
> For those who are interested, the following url may be used to view how
> Wikilove is being used:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AbuseLog&limit=500&wpSearchFilter=423
>
> Please provide feedback on the Wikilove talk page [2].
>
> Thanks!
>
> Howie
>
> [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiLove
> [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:WikiLove<
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiLove_1.0>
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