This community, which takes quite a bit of effort to communicate with, effort which I have not seen from the development team:
Any changes to the software must be gradual and reversible. We need to make sure that any changes contribute positively to the community, as ultimately determined by everybody in Wikipedia, in full consultation with the community consensus. -- Jimbo Waleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales
I've been told by a volunteer developer in that this quote is irrelevant. I wonder how many people believe that is true.
On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.comwrote:
Hello Brian,
thanks for all your insights, bashing and vocal support of your pet ideas.
I understand, that SMW is academically interesting concept (though there're contradicting ideas in academia too, suggesting natural language processing as an alternative, and this seems where currently research tries to go too), and it provides "usability" in niche cases (academic data crunching).
I fail to see why you associate SMW with general usability we're trying to think about? Is that something we simple mortals cannot understand, or are you simply out of touch from reality?
See, our project is special.
a) We have mass collaboration at large b) We end up having mass collaboration on individual articles and topics c) We have mega-mass readership d) We have massive scope and depth
And, oh well, we have to run software development to facilitate all that. As you may notice, the above list puts quite some huge constraints on what we can do. All our features end up being incremental, and even though in theory they are easy to revert, it is the mass collaboration that picks it up and moves to a stage where it is not that easy (and that happens everywhere, where lots of work is being done).
So, you are attacking templates, which have helped to deal with nearly everything we do (and are tiny, compared to overall content they facilitate), and were part of incremental development of the site and where editing community was going. Of course, there are ways to make some of our template management way better (template catalogues, more visual editing of parameters, less special characters for casual editors), but they generally are how we imagine and do information management.
Now, if you want to come up with academic attitudes, and start telling how ontology is important, and all the semantic meanings have to be highlighted, sure, go on, talk to community, they can do it without software support too - by normalizing templates, using templates for tagging relations, then use various external tools to build information overlays on top of that. Make us believe stuff like that has to be deployed by showing initiative in the communities, not by showing initiative by external parties.
Once it comes to actual software engineering, we have quite limited resources, and quite important mandate and cause. We have to make sure, that readers will be able to read, editors will be able to edit, and foundation will still be able to support the project. We may not always try to be exceptionally perfect (Tim does ;-), but that is because we do not want to be too stressed either.
So, when it comes to reader community, software is doing work for them. Some of readers end up engineering software to make it better. When it comes to editing community, software does the work for them. Some of editors end up engineering software to make it better.
Which community are you talking about?
BR,
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]
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