I strongly agree with what Isarra wrote. She's wise.
Ryan Lane wrote:
Isarra Yos writes:
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.
Do we actually know the lessons? Are they listed anywhere? Are they valid
anymore? Do modern web practices cover them?
We need to do better about this.
It's great to iterate on things when they are
relatively modern. It's
folly to do so when you're almost a decade behind the industry standard.
The argument itself is odd because Vector has not been iterating steadily
towards modern practices. It's been stagnant for years.
And this.
The reader community is massive and has no voice,
except their complaints
across the internet. The WMF can and should be the voice for the reader
community.
This is bullshit. "Decisions are made by those who show up." If you want
to be part of the discussion, all you have to do is participate in good
faith. That's how I'm involved, that's how you're involved, that's
how
Isarra and Nemo and Risker and nearly everyone else is involved. Pro-tip:
that's not only how Wikipedia works, that's how life works too.
Isn't a motto of the movement "Be bold"?
What happened to that?
Have you read the English Wikipedia page lately? It's a nightmare. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
I keep meaning to cut it back at some point. The various namespace
restrictions are such silliness. In any case, for a long time it's been
"be bold, but not reckless." A big top-down redesign (not that you're
directly proposing such, I'm speaking generally) would be reckless.
The status quo is that change never happens because
people are too scared
to change. There's no boldness here. There's hardly even basic
assertiveness.
Yeah, the community has put in place some protections to ensure that it
doesn't get trampled by a bunch of product managers sitting in San
Francisco. I won't apologize for that, it's a feature, not a flaw.
"The
community is scared of change" seems to be a common excuse from
those too scared to work with communities outside of their own.
Or an argument of those who think it's not in the readers' best interest
to have editors with little to no knowledge of software engineering or UX
design dictating the engineering and design of reader features.
Encyclopedias are only supposed to be written by experts, too, right? :-)
We're getting into trope territory here.
There's not really a conversation. The UX lead is
saying "Winter is dead,
let's continue with the iterations on Vector", though there's no real
iteration going on. The editor community is opposed to any change that
doesn't completely agree with them, where the "them" is around 5,000
people who also can't agree with each other and aren't qualified to be
making the decisions to begin with.
What would you like to see changed in Vector? Concrete suggestions. For
me, I'd like to see it become a responsive skin (in the process, killing
MobileFrontend) and I'd like to see some of the gradients removed (or at
least re-evaluated). Those are concrete, actionable items that will likely
get resolved this year. Your turn!
MZMcBride