I find this conversation worrying.
On 21/07/15 17:52, Ryan Lane wrote:
Trevor Parscal <tparscal@...> writes:
I also believe that iterating on Vector is highly preferable tointroducing a new skin.
Ideally, each new skin that is introduced is an interation on the previous. What worked well is maintained and built upon, what didn't is changed. We don't ever want to simply throw out what we have.
But we also need to find a point to break off and actually make it into a new one. Keep going in the direction of winter (or whatever), and there comes a point when it simply is not Vector anymore - and that's fine, but there's no reason to take the Vector that was away from those who legitimately liked it, either. We allow users (including third-party users) their preferences, and there is historical value, too, in keeping the older styles around in some form.
In contrast, Vector really is a skin that was implemented specifically for production use and is now a battle tested platform from which to build upon. Also, the UX improvements that were made over Monobook, the status quo at the time, were based on usability research. This is a practice we should continue with for future changes.
"battle tested" == outdated and relatively unchanged in nearly 7 years. The web evolves and Wikimedia does not (at least for readers).
Aye, we do need to move on. But there are also lessons in what has lingered all this time - we need to look at it and understand why in order to properly address it and serve the underlying needs. This is why we iterate on what's there, and don't only make drastically new things.
I know that it's sometimes exciting to people to make dramatic reveals of proposals for sweeping changes. It's also fun to get excited about them. However, this grand-unveiling boil-the-ocean approach never works out in practice. It unnecessarily strains design, developement and community engagement efforts. It is wasteful and wreckless. It is arrogant and ignorant. It's not who we are, and it's not how we do things.
This actually works amazingly well in practice for most organizations. Maybe Wikimedia /should/ be this and maybe it /should/ be how Wikimedia does things.
We are not most organisations; where many answer to external stakeholders, and the consumers are simply the product, that is not so here. Wikimedia doesn't just answer to its communities, it IS the communities - all of them, the various projects, the WMF, GLAM, even dark corners of Commons and random people doing meetups for editathons - and its purpose is not profit, but education via a tenable, usable end result of efforts from all of them.
Isn't a motto of the movement "Be bold"? What happened to that? Maybe we should change things to "Be careful; it's scary to change".
Neither of these work without the other. Being bold, you must be careful, or it will blow up in your face. Being careful gets you nowhere without also being bold.
Even Vector was based heavily on Monobook, and in every way in which early versions of Vector deviated from Monobook, without just cause, it was "fixed" to be more similar. This was not wrong. Making arbitrary changes was wrong. Starting from scratch is even worse.
Only because the community is scared of change. Every community is, though. People got used to Vector and they'd get used to Winter after a month or two. This happens frequently to other major sites. The thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to actually hold strong for a few months until people get used to things, while fixing legitimate bugs.
"The community is scared of change" seems to be a common excuse from those too scared to work with communities outside of their own.
And many communities do propose change - some changes are good, some not so good, some need more resources to ever actually work. Just shoving things down people's throats, however, does not work. Consider the multimedia viewer, which needed an overhaul for copyrights alone and is still problematic to date. Consider visual editor when it was first released; even now, when it is so much more powerful, it isn't even available by default on many major wikis. Consider the typography refresh, which has been piecemeally reverted over the course of months. Then look at extensions like massmessage, abusefilter, timedmediahandler, apisandbox, globalcssjs, and others which considered the use cases and worked with the end users to make a sensible product with little reason to reject it. These may be smaller changes, or less reader-facing, but the way they were developed, never even mind how they were introduced, is particularly important. People were involved, problems were considered.
If you want to know what the "community" is afraid of, it's not change. It's things being developed entirely without them even in mind, getting shoved at them forcefully, and breaking what workflows they have. Unlike for some organisations, these are not simply users we profit off of while they amuse themselves, but volunteers donating their time, effort, and content, and they are the ones you should be concerning yourself with always. Not the readers, them.
We make the content work for the readers so that the volunteers' efforts are not in vain.
We should carefully continue along the path of iterating on Vector. We should gradually converge it's styling and implementation with that of OOjs UI. We should continue improving usability and accessibility on a variety of form factors. We should perform research and base changes on the findings it produces. This will enable us to move forward with minimal cost, and far less drama.
It's sad that Wikimedia has given up on users.
Who has given up? The fact that we are even having this conversation seems pretty clear evidence that we haven't just yet.