On 07/03/2010 06:11 PM, David Gerard wrote:
That's phrased in terms of dominance. It's in effect asking who's the bigger monkey. I think that's a conversation worth avoiding where possible.
The dominance element was brought in, as you well know, by Trevor Parscal's preremptory reversion of the removal of the collapsed list. The dominance was, as you well know, already blatantly exercised. The question now is what defences are possible.
Honestly, I've only followed this casually, so I've lost track of who exactly did what. But "X did it first" is a weak argument. As far as I can tell, this is jusjt another Wrong Version situation.
Please, stop trying to obfuscate.
I'm not trying to obfuscate. I just think power jockeying is a giant waste of time when everybody's allegedly on the same side -- and given our mission, I think we are. This is less a participant's opinion about community/foundation relations, and more my professional opinion about how to handle design questions in modern, highly iterative software development projects.
Many of the people doing well at this are intensely data-driven. YouTube, for example, uses four major independent sources of data to inform design hypotheses, and then they rigorously split-test all proposed changes to monitor impacts on a host of key metrics. They tinker relentlessly, running dozens of experiments in parallel and releasing at least weekly. They only give new designs significant traffic when they've found a measurable improvement.
Wikipedia, given its open, do-ocractic nature, shouldn't be less data-focused than places like that. We should be striving to be leaders, not 5 years behind best practice. In my view, arguing over who's the biggest monkey, and therefore therefore gets to pick which Wrong Version we settle on, is just a big distraction from actual productive work. Large corporations can afford that sort of waste, but I don't think a mission-driven one should tolerate it.
William