Straniu, Jimbo's comments in his keynote about forking concerned
encouraging competent editors who can't work cooperatively with other
people to fork in a way that would be better for everyone in the long run.
I don't believe this disappointing confrontation between the WMF and
volunteers were what Jimbo had in mind.
Pine
On Aug 12, 2014 1:44 AM, "Strainu" <strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Gerard,
Some answers (in a random order).
2014-08-11 12:20 GMT+03:00 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>om>:
You know our projects, you know our licenses. If
you, the "community"do
not
like what you have, you can fork. At Wikimania
forking and leaving the
community was very much discussed. Watch Jimbo's presentation for
instance,
he may be aghast that I quote him here but in his
state of the Wiki he
made
it abundantly clear that it is your option to
stay or go.
I gave up watching Jimbo's keynotes a few years ago, as I would
invariably get pissed off. So, should we understand that the vast
ammounts of money and resources spent on editor retention are a waste
of our money? I sincerely hope this is a heat-of-the-moment argument,
just like the one about closing de.wp.
Hoi,
Code review should be a strictly technical process surely. However the
community CANNOT decide on everything.
Agreed. How about letting the WMF decide for anonymous users and the
community decide for logged-in users? Presumably, the logged-in users
have access to a large panel of options and can make up their own mind
if they disagree with the consensus. Of course, discussions should not
disappear because of such a separation, but even become more active
and hopefully less aggressive.
When you are in those conversations you realise
that many
complications are considered; it is not easy nor obvious.
NB there is not one community, there are many with often completely
diverging opinions. Technically it is not possible to always keep
backward
compatibility / functionality. We are not
backward we need to stay
contemporary.
As a software engineer in a publicly traded company, I understand the
reasoning behind more than 90% of the decisions made by the
Engineering staff - and this worries me terribly, because they *don't*
work for a company. Their objectives and approaches should be
different.
There are three main wiki-use-cases that should receive similar levels
of attention:
* reading
* basic editing
* advanced editing
The first two receive a lot of love, but the third one not so much,
it's even hindered by initiatives designed for the first two. I'm not
saying that we should keep backwards compatibility forever, but since
the WMF wants to deploy stuff early in order to get feedback, it
should begin by offering it as a beta (they do that now), then, when
reaching a decent level of stability, deploy it for anonymous users
and opt-in users and only when it reaches feature-parity with the
feature being replaced should it be pushed for everybody (keeping an
opt-out feature for some time - months or a couple of years).
Take for instance the media viewer: the current version is useless for
editors, as it has basically no controls visible by default (without
scrolling). The future version, presented at Wikimania, has a lot more
stuff visible on the first screen, making it much easier to use for
editing. I believe that the media viewer should have been kept as
opt-in for logged in users until this future version arrives.
Strainu
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