Something positive... I just wanted to express my sincere thanks to the people who made Echo, VisualEditor and Wikidata.
Many of them happen to be my colleagues, but I thank them here as a Wikimedian who frequently does editing workshops.
I did a workshop today, and I was really happy to have these three pieces of software.
Echo, because a participant specifically asked whether he would get a notification if someone reverted his edit. I was happy to say that a few months ago a feature was deployed that does just that. A year ago I wouldn't be able to say that.
VisualEditor, because it saved so much time, both for the newbies and for the workshop organizers. In the past I would spend many minutes explaining about [[]], ====, '''''', <ref name=" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"> and other monstrosities. Today I just told them to use VisualEditor. In particular, I want to thank the VE developers for the recently released feature for editing the image properties. A year ago I wouldn't be able to say that.
Wikidata, because many people there wrote translations of articles, and adding interlanguage links was easy and natural. Click "Add links", pick a language, write the title, that's it. Two years ago I would have to explain about square brackets and colons. Some of them just did it by themselves without even asking me.
So thank you so much.
PS: They also liked UniversalLanguageSelector for easy switching of the interface language and for being able to effortlessly type in Amharic. I'm really biased about this, but I do thank everybody in my team for this.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
In the past I would spend many minutes explaining about [[]], ====, '''''', <ref name=" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"> and other monstrosities.
You should never, ever use URL as a name for a reference. :-)
But I want to join you in thanking the people behind Echo; it's a feature I use virtually everyday, and one without which I cannot imagine discussing any issue on-wiki; I only wish more people used it so I wouldn't miss all those interesting debates!
Tomasz
With due thanks, I would like to specifically point to these two bugs, as I believe they're changing the style of talking unnecessarily. I would like you to see the potential for fixing these early.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49446 - Notifications: Linking a username in an Edit-Summary should trigger a notification https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30750 - Notify user when username used in an edit summary
gry
On 09.04.2014 21:03, Tomasz W. Kozlowski wrote:
But I want to join you in thanking the people behind Echo; it's a feature I use virtually everyday, and one without which I cannot imagine discussing any issue on-wiki; I only wish more people used it so I wouldn't miss all those interesting debates!
Tomasz
Echo is an absolutely great thing, and I am a heavy echo user, however, I am not sure it is scalable. Getting one, two or even ten notifications per day is ok, but if I start getting dozens, I am not sure I would be able to handle them for example after a day off. So that I am not sure it would survive if everybody starts using it heavily.
Cheers Yaroslav
On 12 Apr 2014, at 08:45, "Yaroslav M. Blanter" putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
On 09.04.2014 21:03, Tomasz W. Kozlowski wrote: But I want to join you in thanking the people behind Echo; it's a feature I use virtually everyday, and one without which I cannot imagine discussing any issue on-wiki; I only wish more people used it so I wouldn't miss all those interesting debates! Tomasz
Echo is an absolutely great thing, and I am a heavy echo user, however, I am not sure it is scalable. Getting one, two or even ten notifications per day is ok, but if I start getting dozens, I am not sure I would be able to handle them for example after a day off. So that I am not sure it would survive if everybody starts using it heavily.
If notifications are batched, then I think echo would work well for this. For example, I'd love to see it giving notifications of when photos from Commons are used in the projects, along the lines of '10 of your photos were added to Wikipedia articles. Click to expand this notification/find out more.'
Thanks, Mike
It always makes me happy when I find one of mine being used (a rare rhing in reality) but would surely encourage retention of contributors.
On 12 April 2014 08:05, Mike Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
On 12 Apr 2014, at 08:45, "Yaroslav M. Blanter" putevod@mccme.ru
wrote:
On 09.04.2014 21:03, Tomasz W. Kozlowski wrote: But I want to join you in thanking the people behind Echo; it's a feature I use virtually everyday, and one without which I cannot imagine discussing any issue on-wiki; I only wish more people used it so I wouldn't miss all those interesting debates! Tomasz
Echo is an absolutely great thing, and I am a heavy echo user, however,
I am not sure it is scalable. Getting one, two or even ten notifications per day is ok, but if I start getting dozens, I am not sure I would be able to handle them for example after a day off. So that I am not sure it would survive if everybody starts using it heavily.
If notifications are batched, then I think echo would work well for this. For example, I'd love to see it giving notifications of when photos from Commons are used in the projects, along the lines of '10 of your photos were added to Wikipedia articles. Click to expand this notification/find out more.'
Thanks, Mike _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
And I'd like to thank those who are working on making default settings saner, because at the last presentation I gave in March I could just tell them how easy it is for them to follow what happens to pages after their edits. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=50039&maxdepth=1&hide_resolved=0
(We were not able to see VisualEditor because the library "doesn't have money" to upgrade their Windows computers...)
Nemo
On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 8:58 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Wikidata, because many people there wrote translations of articles, and adding interlanguage links was easy and natural. Click "Add links", pick a language, write the title, that's it. Two years ago I would have to explain about square brackets and colons. Some of them just did it by themselves without even asking me.
So thank you so much.
Thank you, Amir! That's great to hear :)
Amir,
On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Something positive... I just wanted to express my sincere thanks to the people who made Echo, VisualEditor and Wikidata.
+1. IMO Echo is the most useful and easy to use and helps keep the discussions on relevant talk pages.
Cheers Arjuna
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