Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 9/9/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I'm not a coder at all, I'm an editor. If I'm not supposed to believe anything I read on the mailing list without checking out SVN repositories and such to confirm it first-hand, what's the point in reading the mailing lists at all?
You don't have to be a coder to ask critical questions like "Have you actually coded anything yet?".
As Grease Monkee points out.. We don't need software to have stable versions. We do need software to make stable versions work really well. Because the community of non-coders allowed a group of vocal opposers to stifle progress by claiming that there was mysterious software coming "any day now" we've had nothing all this time, and far more importantly we've lost a year of possible experience with stable version like features which could have helped to shape the functionality of the software.
The software that has been implemented has had input from a great number of people, including really extensive input from people in the German Wikipedia community.
There are some things I dislike about it. I would rather that we kept section edit links on the stable page, and simply made a diff appear at the top of the edit screen when you click an edit link from the stable version.
I'd also prefer that once a user has edited a page a cookie is set which will cause them to view the most recent version of that page, this way inattentive newbies will not really know that their change didn't really go live the moment they made it. Plus, once you've edited you really should be exposed to the whole sausage making process. :)
But overall I think it's pretty good, and I'm sure there will be lots of requested changes once it's live. I would have preferred that the features be more driven by experience than informed speculation, but we have what we have..
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Another thing I would like to see is for an anonymous editor visiting the website, have the opportunity to very simply change the viewing system "view by default flagged versions when available" or "always see the latest version for all articles". Toggle type.
Otherwise, I mostly hope that there will be discussions, plain rejection of the tool or acceptance with improvment.
What I hope will NOT happen is a system where editors say
"we are happy to have this system only if there are improvementx X and Y". Then setting the system on with a promise that the improvements are coming in soon. Then see a situation such as the Single Login, where the so-called improvements take 5 years to be done. This would be very wrong.
Ant