Op 2013/08/01 0:00, Erik Moeller schreef:
It's the constant minimization of issues that's the most annoying, Erik.
Reading through your response, you'd think that I was some kind of picky
person with irrationally high expectations. Nothing could be further
from the truth.
If you had
followed that, and understood that the Minimum Viable Product
included cut-and-paste, table editing, and maybe the ability to successfully
and completely edit the hundred or so most edited articles out of all the
millions, you wouldn't have hit the level of pushback you've encountered.
Couple of diffs from a few minutes ago of table edits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Major_League_Soccer&curid=71…
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_True_Blood_characters&am…
That's not just plain vanilla tables, but tables with inline CSS
specified by hand, templates inside cells, etc. No roundtripping
issues or other problems as far as I can tell.
The editor was able to change a 4 to
a 5 in an existing table, that's
true. Could that editor add a row? No. Add a column? No. Delete a row or
a column? No. Are all of those operations part of the bare minimum
feature set for "table editing"? Absolutely.
The kind of table you want us to make work well is this type:
<onlyinclude>{| class="wikitable" style="margin: auto; width:
100%"
|-
! colspan="2" rowspan="2" style="width:3%;"|Season
! rowspan="2" style="width:5%;"|Episodes
! colspan=2|Originally aired
! colspan=2|DVD release
|-
(...)
| style="background:green; color:#134; text-align:center;"|
| style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"| '''[[List of
Big Time Rush
episodes#Film|Film]]'''
| style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"| {{Start date|2012|3|10}}
| style="text-align: center; top" {{N/a}}
| style="text-align: center; top" {{N/a}}
which injects this kind of template:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:N/a&action=edit
In other words, a table partially constructed out of table cell templates.
It's
not that *I* want them to work well. If you look over the whole pop
music area, you will find that most recent articles in that area include
at least one of {{Certification Table Top}}, {{Singlechart}},
{{Albumchart}}, or one of the {{won}}, {{lost}}, {{n/a}} group. Those
templates all failed, and all failed because of *different* bugs.
Now, I understand that you've dealt with dirty diffs
It's not "dirty
diffs": the articles get converted to gibberish on
saves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Big_Time_Rush_episodes&am…
Wholesale destruction of articles is *not* a "dirty diff".
... it's not a trivial issue.
But it's
certainly one that you knew was broken before you released
...
As for copy-and-paste, yes, it's pretty wonky still, and I'm sure
causes a fair bit of frustration for first-time VE users who have no
experience with wikitext. However, it is there within a VE session,
and we see very few diffs where users are causing problems due to
broken copy-and-paste. Does that not match your experience? I've just
inspected another round of 100 diffs and didn't see a single
copy-and-paste related issue. Contrary to Andreas' claim, copying
references isn't completely broken, but the bug is pretty nasty when
it hits, so we'll get it fixed soon.
I'm trying to generate an experience
right now. So far I'm at 11 minutes
of CPU time trying to save the results, so not having diffs is
relatively unsurprising: if I wasn't braced for this, I would have
killed my browser and started over 8 minutes ago.
Wow ... 34 minutes of solid CPU time and the thing still hasn't saved.
I'll get back to the rest of the e-mail and hope it's done before I have
to leave the house.
Just crossed the one hour mark for CPU time, so I'll look back at this
e-mail when I'm done with my morning errands ...
At two hours and five minutes of solid CPU time, I'm going to crash my
browser and try a smaller test. Suffice it to say that a basic test plan
like "open the article about Lady Gaga in one edit window, paste the
results in another edit window, and save the results" was not a smashing
success. Corrupted the article format and could not save.
OK,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kww/pastetest2 shows the results
of copying the second paragraph from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Gaga?veaction=edit and pasting it into
a second edit window. That's *broken*. Inexcusably broken. Copying text
from one article and pasting it into another successfully is a test case
that doesn't require a firehose test to detect, and it certainly is a
part of the Minimum Viable Product.
But I don't want to argue with you - I'm just saying things are a bit
more complex and nuanced.
The problem is that you "do" continue to argue
when you shouldn't. Has
your team accomplished a lot? Absolutely. But your definition of Minimum
Viable Product was so far off the mark that it caused the perception
that what you had wasn't worth testing. That's why the pushback was so
loud and so hard.
KWW