Galder,
I want to start by saying that I totally understand your frustration. I have encountered the Great circle of excuses many times and especially no 6 was used to break many good discussions when they became difficult for the staff. There was a time when I honestly felt the engineers at the WMF were grossly overpaid for what they delivered. But things have changed. Communication about new projects has never been this good and there are a lot of projects going around from both wmf and wmde.
Yes, things are not 100% smooth and I believe no one agrees with all the different changes happening, but we have to keep a cool head and understand that we (community+staff) need to work at planet scale and try to keep a balance between all users, regardless of background or age.
Christophe has nailed the high-level problems IMHO, and to answer your question, we are all responsible for the strategy. I'm not just throwing buzz words around: each community knows its readership and has at least some intuition into what makes it happy. This can be evolved by asking for support from the research team and then trying to implement them or bring them to the WMF road map. This last step is the most difficult, but things like the community wishlist or project grants are some of the tools at our disposal to make our wishes happen. Of course, engaging and/or challenging the WMF also might work. I would personally like to see an office hour with the C-level person in charge of product (I don't even know who that is anymore) where such high-level issues could be brought to the table.
Specifically, for the looks issue, not all the wikis need to look the same. Some stuck with monobook for a number of years, other are using the Timeless skin. If the current team is not implementing your wishes, why not look for other ways to improve at least your home wiki?
Have a great weekend,
Strainu
Pe sâmbătă, 16 octombrie 2021, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.com> a scris:
> Thanks Christophe,
> And whose responsibility is to answer to "And if you read the whole thread it is not really about money but more about product vision/strategy/roadmap :)"? Who should have this strategy, vision and roadmap?
>
> That's the x in this equation.
> Galder
> ________________________________
> From: Christophe Henner <christophe.henner@gmail.com>
> Sent: Saturday, October 16, 2021 9:33 AM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: 100$ million dollars and still obsolete
>
> Hi,
> I will the whole first part of the discussion :)
> As for the product discussion. We should very mindful of what we consider our ProductS.
> We tend to talk a lot about the wikis. They are products that can be improved, and have been and still should evolve yes. And I agree it would be great if they improved more, be updated for both readers and editors. But the context, with so many communities to satisfy makes it very hard.
> Be damned if you do, be damned if you don't sort of things.
> But, they are not obsolete.
> What however is, to me, obsolete is our shared very occidental web vision of our products.
> What can makes us obsolete, is our inability to adapt our products or create new products adapted to new mean of content consumption.
> From a content consumption perspective, video and audio have a lot of tractions.
> Short and fast burst of information is taking more and more place on how we consume content.
> The disintermediation of content is more than here and even if we have Wikidata, we are not, yet!, exploiting it's full potential to spread content.
> VR and AR are 5 to 10 years away as mass market products. But it will requires years to do something good for us around it.
> Yes editing can be improved, but to me it is not where we will see obsolescence first. Content consumption is clearly to me the topic.
> I know it can be easy to say "hey look at simultaneous editing on gdoc or 365". Yes that's a nice thing, but would it be a game changer for us? But having all around the world PoP to decrease loading time also is a great product improvement. Etc.
> All that to say, yes there is a lot of work from a product perspective, but it can be easy to have our own biases give us a twisted view of what needs to be improved.
> And if you read the whole thread it is not really about money but more about product vision/strategy/roadmap :)
> Which we might be missing or isn't known enough.
> Le sam. 16 oct. 2021 à 8:41 AM, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.com> a écrit :
>
> True Samuel. We can actually edit [Wikipedia] from our mobile phones. We can't use the visual editor. I tried to say it later with the sentence "Desktop computers are disappearing. We still can't edit in a good way with our mobile phones." but it's true the first time I mentionen this it was not factual.
>
> About the other projects, it doesn't matter where the bottleneck is: we are obsolete and we have 100 million dollars. We try to make some improvements using a wishlist system that only creates culture of scarcity, instead of culture of abundance. There is a reason to create scarcity, but this is a topic for another essay.
> Have a good weekend
> Galder
> ________________________________
> From: Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com>
> Sent: Saturday, October 16, 2021 3:07 AM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: 100$ million dollars and still obsolete
>
> Luis writes:
>> For what it is worth, I think the current mobile app is pretty good and I regularly finding pleasant surprises
>
> Yea, the mobile app is sweet, editing and all.
> Responding to two specific earlier comments:
> 1. Galder - "It is 2021 and we still can't edit by mobile phone."
>
> --> Safe to say this is not true :) But you could say that about your later comment on the ability to "write simultaneously ... upload videos ... autosave", each of which are common in online collaborative spaces, and which we do need to make standard for our wikis. But the bottlenecks aren't primarily design, but rather coordinated vision and focus -- or at least unblocking and supporting one another as we design and implement prototypes. We need new social norms and clear community use cases for simultaneous editing (resolving attribution and revision history for multiparty edits), video uploading (how to note the original upload if we only save a transcode), and drafts (rallying support behind a specific client-side use case to realize).
>
> 2. Jonathan -
> "[In my new sw company] we have the autonomy to make the changes in the first place, see what happens, and then build from there..."
> "WMF product teams work in an environment where [...] one set of end users (editors) has a great deal of both soft and hard power to block changes, even when those changes are intended for--and indeed, primarily affect--a different set of end users (readers)."
> --> These comments highlight a common misframing, about autonomy and curation of the reading experience, worth addressing. (Likely deserves its own thread!)
>
> Much of the friction and tension in our movement stems from different understandings of autonomy; and the impedance mismatch of a step function between the norms (of communication, delegation, and planning) of a) broad community wikiocracies and b) narrow staff hierarchies. Our community has thousands of designers; the staff has scores, who may feel constrained to work on only their particular projects. There is abundant talent.
> Most active editors and curators are not "end users" of the site, any more than developers are -- they are involved before the end, up and down the design and implementation stack, building bridges, interfaces, translations. They are project stewards, schedulers, templaters, designers, and maintainers. So when interface designers deploying a new language-selector design are talking with layout designers maintaining article flair like geo-coordinates and article status indicators, they should feel they are on the same team: improving the site skin together.
>
> This is a solved problem in some corners, but the solutions are not evenly distributed. Within Wikimedia, and within the WMF, there are groups and projects of all sizes that have developed without this sort of contention. But we spend most of our time and energy talking about the ones that fail to do so. [The article always ends on the wrong version; confusion is always due to the other person :-] Let's learn from the successes, and not fall into stereotyping any parts of our nexus.
> Wishing all a beautiful week's end,
> SJ
>
>
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