Thanks Vito and Samuel for your words,
As a leader of an Education Program, I talk every day to students, people who was born after Wikipedia and have assumed during all their life that Wikipedia exists. They are digital natives, but, for the good or for the bad, they are used to having everything
deployed, working and simple. They are used to Google Drive and its collaboration platforms; they are used to just buying some new device and having the operative system there. They haven't dealt with installing their own OS, making separate drives for data
and OS or just having folders in their desktop to save things.
I have been with more than 6.000 students in the last 4 years (
https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/campaigns/hezkuntza_programa/programs 4.147
accounts created) and they are shocked with the obsolescence of our platform. They don't understand why they can't write simultaneously, why they can't upload videos, or why there's not autosave. I'm with them every day, so I hear what they think about the
design, the usability. They make the same mistakes once and again, so I'm starting to think that those are not mistakes, but software/UX errors.
Our system was obsolete 10 years ago. Whenever we fix something, we are a decade late. The new vector will be, too, a decade late. And every change we aren't doing is losing new contributors. Old wikimedians will eventually leave the project, because they can't
contribute, because they have lost their enthusiasm or just because they die. If we want to have a whole new generation of wikimedians editing, then things must be thought for them, making everything easier, appealing and aligned with the way they have to
contribute. Desktop computers are disappearing. We still can't edit in a good way with our mobile phones. We have a whole strategy thought for the 2030, but we aren't making any real usability step in that direction.
We have still some time left. And we have the most important thing: a mountain of money. Let's invest in the best way we can: attracting a new generation of Wikimedians who will push our projects to new heights and will make that little investment of money
multiply for the future.
Galder
PD: Samuel, yes, of course, I use tropes, stylistic recourses and metaphors. I'm trying to tell something! 😉
From: Vi to <vituzzu.wiki@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, October 15, 2021 9:07 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: 100$ million dollars and still obsolete
Regular contributors experience is quite different from less frequent contributors and (above all) readers. People into user interfaces design surely have a proper word for this, but we're used to a variety of small tricks/habits which are somehow expensive
to change.
For example, since OOUI's developed I've been upset because it seems to need some more keystrokes for blocks and deletions. I, for one, am still using monobook, and I won't change it unless forced.
Introducing visual editor implied a cost for the communities to fix garbage wikicode introduced by VE during its first weeks/months, some years later, linterrors became the best game for our bots.
So I can confirm the inertia of regular editors about user interface is, usually, humongous, but also the project themselves have an enormous inertia since they are collections of terabytes of wikicode created during almost two decades.
I feel like this problem has never been addressed in a wide, strategic, way, leaving developers being torn apart by conflicting needs.
Vito
Hi all,
A good example around this subject was the Visual Editor tool implementation, strongly opposed by the community in the beginning, and developed by the WMF, as it was probably necessary to turn Wikipedia into a more modern website.
A lot about the latter can be found and read as a real example of this debate
The cultural behavior of the group is a big factor on any technological implementation on the Wikimedia world, and to change culture, you need much more than money.
Sorry if this was mentioned before.
Cheers,
No, I don't have all the answers. Is just that every time someone says: "hey! this is broken!" and receives an excuse and then says again "HEY! THIS IS BROKEN!" the answer is not: "ok, we'll try to figure out how to solve it" but: "don't use caps". I'm a volunteer.
I have spent lots of time trying to solve issues. Most of this time wasn't about the issue, was about someone trying to convince me that the bug was a feature. And now, when I tell here where "I THINK" that the problem is, I get a "you are being rude" excuse.
Great. I'm being rude. Now, can we fix the problem?
Thanks
Galder
Thanks Dan for using the Excuse 6: At this point in the circle, there is some volunteer who wants to fix this and raises the tone of the request. Then we find the mother of all excuses, the wild card: you are being rude and do not assume good faith. Excuse
6.
I guess you've got all the answers then, eh?
I think we're done here.
Dan
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