Hi Lila,
May I request a Tech Talk about efficiency and quality of Wikimedia software development? It would be interesting to have you, Erik and Damon as presenters.
Thanks,
Pine On Oct 7, 2014 9:07 AM, "Lila Tretikov" lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Are you in? Or are you out? That is the question.
Lila
P.S. If you'd like to talk about operational efficiency and quality of software manufacturing -- please start a thread on that. We are deep into working on that here, so would be happy to share the love!
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 7:36 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Because of that, I am very happy to see somebody with courage and integrity in the top management. Such person has much larger potential to create the momentum and build community enthusiasm again.
Is someone saying "I have courage and integrity" all it takes to convince you that they are indeed possessed of those qualities? Every politician says that. I'd reserve judgment and wait to see their performance.
Besides, what has been lacking is not courage. Creating the
Superprotection
feature, pressing ahead with the Flow concept in the face of massive community skepticism and rolling out a very poorly implemented
VisualEditor
undoubtedly took courage of a sort.
What's been lacking is an ability to convince the community through argument rather than the exercise of power, an ability to understand the community's needs and concerns, and sheer old-fashioned engineering competence – something the VisualEditor signally failed to demonstrate.
Jimmy Wales acknowledged that there have been huge problems. Recently, a Wikipedian quoted the following to him on his talk page:
*“The Foundation has a miserable cost/benefit ratio and for years now has spent millions on software development without producing anything that actually works; the feeling is that the whole operation is held together with the goodwill of its volunteers and the more stupid Foundation
managers
are seriously hacking them off”,*
Wales replied[1] (my emphasis),
*“Other than the extreme nature of the comment (‘without producing ANYTHING’ is too strong) why do you think I would disagree with that?
This
is precisely the point of the new CEO and new direction – to radically improve the software development process. That statement, while too
strong,
is indeed an accurate depiction of what has gone wrong. I’ve been frustrated as well about the endless controversies about the rollout of inadequate software not developed with sufficient community consultation and without proper incremental rollout to catch showstopping bugs.”* I don't want to be unduly churlish to Damon, who deserves his welcome
here
like any new team member, but given the above background I personally
would
have appreciated an intimation from Damon that he is aware of the
problems
to date, that roll-outs will be handled more competently on his watch,
and
that the community will not be presented with substandard software again.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=ne...
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