While I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, Todd, there were 14,681 users on English Wikipedia alone who had enabled MediaViewer using the Beta Features preference before it became the default. That's a huge number of people who were all using it every time they clicked on an image in the weeks and months beforehand, and every one of them had to make a conscious decision to turn it on. The 64 users who want it disabled as default pale in comparison to the number of people who were actively using it beforehand.
I've asked for some better statistical information because I don't think the Limn graphs that have been referred to in the discussion of the RFC are really accurate; it's my understanding that about 1600 registered accounts have opted out of MV in total (this should be a linear graph of the cumulative total, not a "daily number of people who opted out" graph which is what we seem to see now). As well, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 "logged out" users a day are disabling it - this needs to be a daily number, not a cumulative one, because logged-out disabling is linked to the individual browser session; those who aren't logged in don't have the chance to set preferences. There are between 4 and 5 *million* clicks on image thumbnails every day on enwiki, with only around 500 of those viewing the images disabling the MediaViewer (excluding logged-in users who have turned it off in their preferences).
I suspect that at the end of the day, MediaViewer is going to be more like the switch to Vector skin: there will be plenty of people who choose to disable for reasons that work for them, but the overwhelming majority of users will be entirely fine with the default. It's having nowhere near the impact that VisualEditor had when first enabled as default; in the first 48 hours there were hundreds of "how do you turn this off" queries and complaints about functionality, not to mention pretty much automatic reverting of edits done by IPs because there were so many VE-related problems associated with them. We're not at that level at all here. I agree with John Vandenberg's comments that a clear roadmap and prioritized list of next steps is probably required for MediaViewer.
Risker/Anne
On 11 July 2014 00:56, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
If you don't want to do small opt-in trials, release software in a fully production-ready and usable state. What's getting released here is barely ready for beta. It's buggy, it's full of unexpected UX issues, it's not ready to go live on one of the top 10 websites in the world. It's got to be in really good shape to get there.
Until software is actually ready for widescale use, small and very limited beta tests are exactly the way to go, followed by maybe slightly larger UAT pools. Yeah, that takes longer and requires actual work to find willing testers. Quit taking shortcuts through your volunteers.
On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 10:40 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey guys,
I use MediaViewer, I like it, and I am happy to trust the WMF product
team
to build stuff. I didn't know about the RFC, but even if I had I would've been unlikely to have participated, because I don't think small opt-in discussions are the best way to do product development -- certainly not
at
the scale of Wikipedia.
I think we should aim on this list to be modest rather than overreaching
in
terms of what we claim to know, and who we imply we're representing. It's probably best to be clear --both in the mails we write and in our own
heads
privately-- that what's happening here is a handful of people talking on
a
mailing list. We can represent our own opinions, and like David Gerard we can talk anecdotally about what our friends tell us. But I don't like it when people here seem to claim to speak on behalf of editors, or users,
or
readers, or the community. It strikes me as hubristic.
Thanks, Sue On 10 Jul 2014 16:13, "MZMcBride" z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
In this case, we will keep the feature enabled by default (it's easy to turn off, both for readers and editors), but we'll continue to improve it based on community feedback (as has already happened in the last few weeks).
Thanks for the reply. :-)
If your feature development model seemingly requires forcing features
on
users, it's probably safe to say that it's broken. If you're building
cool
new features, they will ideally be uncontroversial and users will
actively
want to enable them and eventually have them enabled by default. Many
new
features (e.g., the improved search backend) are deployed fairly
regularly
without fanfare or objection. But I see a common thread among
unsuccessful
deployments of features such as ArticleFeedbackv5, VisualEditor, and MediaViewer. Some of it is the people involved, of course, but the
larger
pattern is a fault in the process, I think. I wonder how we address
this.
MZMcBride
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