On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 4:47 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
There is way too much blaming/bashing/sour expectations working both ways - we almost forget how unique we are, irrespective of many slips and avoidable failures we make (and WMF is definitely leading here, too! ;)
No, we're not. My peers in the Technology department work incredibly hard to provide value for readers and editors, and we have very good results to show for it. Less than two years ago it took an average of six seconds to save an edit to an article; it is about one second now. (MediaWiki deployments are currently halted over a 200-300ms regression!). Page load times improved by 30-40% in the past year, which earned us plaudits in the press and in professional circles. The analytics team figured out how to count unique devices without compromising user anonimity and privacy and rolled out a robust public API for page view data. The research team is in the process of collecting feedback from readers and compiling the first comprehensive picture of what brings readers to the projects. The TechOps team made Wikipedia one of the first major internet properties to go HTTPS-only, slashed latency for users in many parts of the world by provisioning a cache pop on the Pacific Coast of the United States, and is currently gearing up for a comprehensive test of our failover capabilities, which is to happen this Spring.
That's just the activity happening immediately around me in the org, and says nothing of engineering accomplishments like the Android app being featured on the Play store in 93 countries and having a higher user rating than Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Netflix, Snapchat, Google Photos, etc. Or the 56,669 articles that have been created using the Content Translation tool.
This is happening in spite of -- not thanks to -- dysfunction at the top. If you don't believe me, all you have to do is wait: an exodus of people from Engineering won't be long now. Our initial astonishment at the Board's unwillingness to acknowledge and address this dysfunction is wearing off. The slips and failures are not generalized and diffuse. They are local and specific, and their location has been indicated to you repeatedly.