On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 1:45 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As a huge VE advocate, I was quite disconcerted how hard the WMF was
trying to force through what was clearly an early beta in need of
real-world testing as if it were a production-ready product; I think
this was the problem and the reason for the backlash. VE *now* has had
a couple of years' development in a real-world environment and is
really quite excellent (and the only sensible way to edit tables). But
the problem here was not fear of change or fear of technology, but
rejecting technology that was being forced on editors when it was
really obviously not up to the job as yet.
- d.
This. David and Risker say it well. From my position, as the guy
responsible for the team that was worried about the non-technical aspects
of the rollout, I think I'm safe
in saying that the root cause was a lack of a clearly articulated minimum
viable product. From the WMF developers' POV, "Hey! it does half of what
you need!" was a pretty substantial win at the time. From the POV of a
random editor, "Hey! it only does //half// of what I need" was pretty
damning criticism.
I own part of the blame for that rollout. I wish I'd pushed back harder.
In my own defense, the team that had to articulate these changes and manage
the social roll out (which formed the corpus of the Community Engagement
(Product) team today) was hired about 11 minutes before the roll-out. We
didn't have much of a chance to have direct influence. And I don't think
we really knew how many editing errors would be introduced - I don't think
that anyone expected that, and until we got it up to scale, we wouldn't
have seen that, necessarily.
The real flaw was the failure to agree with the editing community on what
the minimum viable product was. I'm pleased to say that the WMF learned a
lot from that experience, and by the time I left, we had moved on to making
a whole new set of mistakes....
But yeah, what David and Risker said.
pb
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