On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 7:59 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It's disturbing that even at the same time as the
engineering and
operations departments are working so hard to professionalize their work,
to bring themselves up to industry standards, to properly staff themselves
with people who understand not just the technical side, but also the
content side - that there remains this cowboy attitude toward applying
poorly developed software onto huge sites knowing full well that the
software create significant community disruption. This isn't a little
backwater website anymore, and it should never be the subject of a major
test without the active engagement of those who are going to be the test
subjects.
Wiki design 101 is that nobody gets sent to another page/website/etc to
edit content on the Wikipedia. (Even clicking on an image that is held on
Commons takes people to a Wikipedia page for the image, and then gives them
the choice to go to Commons.) This software is not ready for deployment;
everyone here knows it. This is now just pride taking the place of common
sense. (And no, David, it's not bikeshedding.)
Figure out why the content itself is being affected, instead of creating a
new namespace that will hold all this data: wikidata, authority control
data, H-cards, V-cards, and all the other miscellaneous stuff that has been
applied to articles.
This is not a technical problem to be solved. It is at its core a
philosophical matter to be grappled with, project by project.
Learn some lessons from the folks down the hall in Fundraising - who have
figured out how to fully fund all of these projects with the minimal amount
of disruption to the content and the editorial process. Figure out how to
do that, and you'll have a winner.
I understand you're upset but please also understand the other side.
We've put a lot of work into making it possible for each Wikipedia to
decide how they want to make use of the data for example. The existing
system is built to exactly not disrupt anything that exists until the
local community decides to make changes. I understand that making this
decision is difficult in a large project as enwp but it's not like
we're replacing infoboxes that exist automatically for example. We've
from the beginning of the project started with letting people use
early stages of the project exactly because we needed the feedback to
shape the tool in a way that will serve Wikipedia - and we'd like this
at each step of the way because otherwise we're bound to build
something that is in one form or another not useful for you. We've
always started with test systems and smaller Wikipedias (Go them!) but
that only goes so far unfortunately.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher -
http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Community Communications for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Obentrautstr. 72
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
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Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.