On 9/28/2010 4:41 PM, Risker wrote:
On 28 September 2010 18:58, Ryan Lomonacowiki.ral315@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Michael Snow<wikipedia@frontier.com wrote:
We would be better off with more people working seriously to figure out the best answers to the issues this feature addresses, plus whatever issues there may be with the feature itself, rather than having a debating duel about the significance of a set of polling statistics. It's like having politicians decide how to govern entirely based on opinion polls.
This is really a much better point than I made.
Yes it is, and it's an important one. Several of us had already been working on a plan for the second trial, and those of us discussing had widely agreed that it would be much more likely to be successful if more of the recommendations on improving the software were incorporated, thus our recommendation that it not proceed so rapidly.
It's pretty hard to maintain motivation, though, when it's clear that the software's going to be a permanent feature regardless of what the project does or thinks, and that any further "trial" is not going to change that fact.
Aside from the point already made regarding the desires of projects other than the English Wikipedia - I guess I struggle to see what's so demotivating about the prospect of a feature being "permanent" in the sense of being written into MediaWiki code while the English Wikipedia community still has the full ability to decide not to implement it on that project. Is it the potential of having to withstand continued political battles seeking to have it activated? That would implicitly acknowledge, at the very least, that there is some need not being met, meaning that alternative solutions are required.
Further improved trials might get us closer to such solutions, and we should keep experimenting where we can. I'll reserve comment as to whether we have the right balance between urgency in tackling serious problems and exercising patience to maximize our chances of success.
I don't often write to this list, and I realise that I sound fairly negative in this thread. The fact of the matter is that I personally entered more articles into the first trial than any other administrator (20% of all articles involved), that I actively and strongly encouraged other administrators to do so as well, that I pushed hard to ensure that the largest number of editors possible received reviewer permissions, and I was one of the few people who trialed the version on the test wiki in the two weeks before it went live, finding a significant number of problems (some of which were addressed in advance of the release). I was also the person who made sure that the WMF spokesperson with respect to the trial was in agreement with the prior stated position of the community, and that the feature would be turned off if there was not clear and unambiguous support for it at the end of the trial, just to make sure we were all on the same page.
So, yes...right now I (and several other administrators who were very active in this trial) are very disturbed at what has happened here. We felt there was a clear criterion for continued use of the tool, which was worthy of our collective time, energy and powers of persuasion. With that in mind, it's almost impossible to consider developing a second trial, since it doesn't seem like it will matter what criteria for continued use the project determines.
From this characterization, my impression is not so much that there is a conflict between the community consensus and the developers; much more, it strikes me that the extent of adoption and publicity for this feature remains tremendously limited, so that it's extremely difficult to say it's been adequately evaluated or speak of a consensus about it. If the Wikimedia Foundation has fallen short, then, it's not by disregarding the will of the community, but in a responsibility shared with community leaders, of gaining attention from a wider group of participants. I would guess that the vast majority of people actively involved in the English Wikipedia still barely know any of what's going on with this. That may be somewhat surprising to those of us who have been involved in Wikimedia projects for a long time and think of this as a perennial proposal for addressing longstanding issues. But I think not only do people see this proposal through very different lenses, but for many the lens is focused elsewhere anyway, and they are watching different trees in the forest. Part of the challenge is figuring out when and how it's appropriate to interpose "corrective" lenses to guide people's energy in certain directions.
--Michael Snow