FWIW, ironically the tangled discussions about MediaViewer across multiple
pages have made me think that having a more organized way to read
discussions would be a good idea. My understanding is that this is one of
Flow's objectives. If Flow can achieve this in a way that is helpful and
non-disruptive then I think Flow may save power users time because we may
be able to follow multi-page discussions easily. I would appreciate it if
Flow helped with that. Of course, the design, implementation and testing
need to be done carefully, and I hope there is heavy community involvement
in reviewing Flow long before it gets sent to the largest and most
sophisticated wikis.
Pine
On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 4:07 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 1:48 PM, John Mark Vandenberg
<jayvdb(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
IMO the WMF should stop focusing on English
Wikipedia as a target
deploy site, and stop allowing its product management team and WMF
staff in general to be salesman for it - it is scaring the community
that all WMF staff seem to be so heavily vested in this 'product' as
the salvation of the wikis.
This is rank hyperbole.
The MediaWiki deployment train delivers new software to all projects every
week. One stage is to non-Wikipedia projects, which actually get new
software *first.* Then in a second stage is for all Wikipedias
simultaneously. So the default behavior for rollouts, if all you do is
merge your code and wait, is that English Wikipedia gets basically no
special treatment..[1]
Now, for larger feature rollouts like VisualEditor or MediaViewer, the
testing stage and eventual launch set their own special schedule. We have
used English Wikipedia as a testing ground a lot in the past, which is
natural when you consider a variety of factors.[2] That doesn't mean we
haven't worked hard to test things out with non-English projects. Some
examples:
-- MediaViewer spent a long time being tested outside English Wikipedia
before it ever touched that project. It started with pilots in non-English
Wikipedias and English Wikivoyage.[3]
-- Flow is currently soliciting editors on non-English projects to test it
out voluntarily on a sub-set of pages. Any projects that want to help shape
the future of this software should pick a discussion space they want to use
for testing and speak up.
-- My team (Growth) has begun waiting for translations of experimental
interfaces, so we can A/B test in many languages simultaneously. We're
about to do this again in this month, by testing task recommendations in 12
languages right from the start.[4] We've done with other projects as well,
like A/B testing changes aimed at anonymous editors in four languages.
-- The Content Translation project is starting with Spanish and Catalan
Wikipedias.[5]
After we get past the testing stage, none of this erases the fact that
English Wikipedia is still the largest project by far, and is a major
problem spot to be dealt with regarding issues related to new editor
acquisition and retention. The data clearly suggests that it's a project we
should be focusing on if we want to fix these problems, but we're certainly
not ignoring others.
1).
wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Deployments
2). All technical staff and community contributors share English as their
working language. Software gets built in English first obviously, so we
don't have to wait on translations as a blocker for deployment. English
Wikipedia is also our largest project, so we can get larger randomized
samples during A/B tests. Making A/B tests shorter while also retaining
accuracy is good.
3).
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan
4).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Task_recommendations/Experiment_one
5).
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Roadmap
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