Sue,
I sent the below included inquiry to wikitech-l regarding http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/.
Now almost a month later I still have received no response regarding the status of this test deployment. It is is still not active on the test site, — although this has literally gone on for months.
As far as I can tell this is one of the most significant initiatives on English Wikipedia as of lately— in that it has site wide impact and the design and decision of the configuration was the work of hundreds of people, including a reworking after the WMF staff refused to implement the initial decision which only achieved almost a decent majority support, for lack of sufficient community support. Now that the plan has been improved and the support is overwhelming a commitment to roll with this plan was made but no progress appears to be being made. Inquiries have been met with silence.
I believe the community expects and deserves a greater level of responsiveness from the staff of Wikimedia.
What I'd like to know— What is delaying this deployment? What is a reasonable expectation for the timeline in implement community chosen decisions? How can communication be improved so that the communities high priority implementations aren't ignored for weeks and even months by wikimedia staff? How can the people who care about this help see it through to completion?
What does this say about the enormous strategic projects initiate when Wikimedia is already failing to meet its commitments on high impact community initiatives?
Thank you for your time and consideration.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com Date: Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:21 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org Status? To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:17 PM, K. Peacheyp858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 7:02 AM, PlatonidesPlatonides@gmail.com wrote:
You know, when you point to a broken page, people^W wikipedians tend to do absurd things like fixing them :)
I was going to fix some up, but import is restricted and i was too lazy to do copy/paste imports.
Ehhh. It don't know that it makes sense to spend effort manually fixing pages on a test project. If the import procedure is not working right it should be improved...
In any case, I'm sorry for the tangent. The main intent of my post was to determine the current status:
Is the import finished? When will the configuration changes for flagged protection be turned on?
Hi Greg,
a quick note on Sue's behalf since we're all quite swamped right now. On the tech side of things we're planning for the CTO transition right now, as well as building up our capacity; those are core foundation-building priorities that have to be higher than any specific deployment, particularly given Brion's departure now.
We haven't committed to a specific FlaggedRevs deployment deadline precisely because there isn't enough capacity right now to allocate to the project. Pretty much all development work is done by a single contractor, Aaron Schulz, who is amazing and deserves massive credit for the fact that there is a usable FlaggedRevs extension at all, which is in production use on our second-largest Wikipedia and many others. There's no project manager for it, there are no other developers who are assigned to working with Aaron, nor are there team meetings to plan the further roll-out of the product.
The only situation where there's actually a dedicated full-time team working on one specific problem-set is the usability project, and that's because we've been able to receive an $890,000 grant specifically to build it. It's time-limited, but we're looking for ways to extend it past its grant run. As I think has been visible with the successful roll-out of the usability beta, the milestones so far, etc., this is one viable approach to get stuff done.
Should we have a dedicated quality assurance team? Perhaps; it's a high-risk but potentially also high-gain technology priority. Is it higher priority than, for example, massively improving mobile access to Wikipedia and thereby potentially reaching hundreds of millions of new readers/contributors? Maybe: The Strategy Project is designed to help us answers these questions. At this stage of organizational development, we can possibly have 2-3 usability-sized tech projects per year. There are other ways to support project roll-outs, such as hiring product/project managers, which we've budgeted for but may have to delay past the other planned tech hiring.
All that said, even with Brion transitioning, we're hoping to have at least some scheduled small group conversations about the roll-out plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with de.wp, and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation. The user interface is well-suited for the current de.wp implementation, but needs some TLC to work for the "flagged protection" use case.
We're committed to getting there but at this stage I can't give you a better promise than allocating some percentage of the core team to supporting the UI development, testing, and production roll-out, hopefully resulting in a full production roll-out prior to the end of this year.
Erik
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with de.wp,
Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet. I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have not yet been added to the test wiki at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation.
Please help me understand the implications of this statement.
The English Wikipedia reached an overwhelmingly strong decision to try a particular mode of operation. I hope you can appreciate how difficult it can be to balance various interest and achieve agreement on a change with such a widespread impact on a project as large and well established as EnWP.
Enhancements were made to the software by volunteers to support the proposal and a configuration was designed. Since then there has been almost no progress in turning up a public trial wiki with this configuration for testing and further refinement.
Now, "we" (I do know know for whom you speak) are concerned about an underspecified concern regarding a negative impact on participation. So? Now what? Does the now staff obstruct the rollout with passive resistance and year+ delays? Based both on the actions thus far and on your statement this is what it sounds like to me.
Is this sort of over-concern regarding participation, so paranoid that it obstructs a simple time limited trial of an article selective feature, the behavior we can now expect from the WMF now that it has substantial funding tied to unspecified participation goals?
I too am concerned about participation: I'm concerned that people who came to build a project together will not want to participate under a Wikimedia Foundation which views its contributors as 'users' rather than partners.
Reaching a design for the policy and configuration and educating and convincing people is the result of thousands of hours of volunteer labor from hundreds of people across several years. Moreover, the ability to reach a decision to try something at this scale is a ray of hope that EnWP hasn't become totally stuck and immune to change. All of this is wasted if the Wikimedia Foundation isn't able or willing to hold up its side of its partnership with the community.
The user interface is well-suited for the current de.wp implementation, but needs some TLC to work for the "flagged protection" use case.
The community has largely taken care of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revi...
Of course, there will need to be additional refinement but that can not proceed until the test wiki is up.
We're committed to getting there but at this stage I can't give you a better promise than allocating some percentage of the core team to supporting the UI development, testing, and production roll-out, hopefully resulting in a full production roll-out prior to the end of this year.
When will the test wiki be activated? This requires something like pasting 25 lines of configuration, an extension install, and kicking a maintenance script.
Even if everything else is delayed having the text site up and running would allow the community to test and provide feedback to volunteer developers who can refine the software in advance of the availability of resources for the large scale deployment.
2009/9/28 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet. I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have not yet been added to the test wiki at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
I'll review the current state of the prototype w/ Brion this week and whatever needs to be done to get broader testing will get done ASAP.
and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation.
Please help me understand the implications of this statement.
It simply means that
a) we want to make sure that for the production roll-out, the user interface is not insane and appropriate to the specific en.wp configuration that's been proposed; b) we'll want to track participation metrics after the roll-out to see what the impact of this technology is.
Accusations of "obstructionism" don't help; I understand where these come from, but it's a massive case of assume bad faith. Please stop it.
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation.
Please help me understand the implications of this statement.
It simply means that
a) we want to make sure that for the production roll-out, the user interface is not insane and appropriate to the specific en.wp configuration that's been proposed;
Aren't our volunteers qualified to contribute to this?
b) we'll want to track participation metrics after the roll-out to see what the impact of this technology is.
I'm not sure what after the fact analysis has to do with the deployment schedule.
Accusations of "obstructionism" don't help; I understand where these come from, but it's a massive case of assume bad faith. Please stop it.
"Bad faith" — I don't think those words means what you think they mean.
I don't think anyone at the WMF is acting in bad faith. Surely if you intended to harm Wiki(p|m)edia you could come up with something better than this.
My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki that there simply hasn't been time to even make a simple configuration change; ghat WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project, or that the WMF staff has decided that it knows better than hundreds of contributors and that it needed to act paternalistic and protect the community against its own decision by ignoring it. I am not the only person to harbor these concerns, for example see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_... .
All off of these can be supported by the facts in front of me; None of them reflect very positively on Wikimedia's staff, but neither require even an ounce of bad faith.
If "assume good faith" has become a code-word for "pretend everything is done perfectly; ignore problems; provide no criticism" then it's an aspect of our culture that needs to be eliminated.
I felt the latter hypothesis was supported by your statement that "we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation". Even with your clarification I can't help but understand that when I ask 'Why is FOO being delayed' and you respond (in part) 'Because we are concerned that it will harm things' that you aren't saying that you're intending to obstruct the deployment...
Extracting the purest (strawman?) form of statement: "It has not been done yet, in part, because we think what the community decided may harm participation. However, we aren't working with the community to ameliorate this harm" is pretty much the definition of obstruction.
This is precisely the thing I was talking about when I said that I'm concerned that Wikimedia is treating the contributors as 'users' rather than partners: If there are concerns about negative side-effects of an initiative with a partner, you talk them out and find solutions, you don't drag your feet on implementing and hope the demand goes away— though some organizations find that to be an acceptable approach to handling needy customers.
If Wikimedia were more communicative about limitations and timelines and more responsive to requests there wouldn't be as much need or room to speculate.
Greg, I really don't want to reply to the specifics of this conversation -- Brion and Erik and others are much more deeply involved, and therefore better situated to respond.
But I will say this: I know some people have speculated, or asked, if the Wikimedia Foundation is deliberately holding up implementation of FlaggedRevs in English Wikipedia, because the staff doesn't want it, or thinks it's a bad idea. For the record: we are not.
I personally am worried that an aggressive deployment of FlaggedRevs may act as a barrier to new participants. The statistics for new editors on the German Wikipedia seem to suggest that their implementation has in fact caused a decline in new editors. I find that worrying. But I realize that 1) there may be other factors at play on the German Wikipedia, affecting participation, that are unrelated to FlaggedRevs, 2) the implementation of FlaggedRevs for English is quite different from the implementation on the German Wikipedia, and 3) the English community has made a decision, which it has every right to do. To be super-clear: the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation is not deliberately holding up rollout of FlaggedRevs on the English Wikipedia because of concerns about whether it's a good idea.
WRT to your point about relative priorities: the Wikimedia Foundation has gotten funding from the Stanton Foundation and the Ford Foundation, that's specifically earmarked for usability work. That is good: usability is a critical priority. We can't reallocate that funding to other technical work: it's restricted to the purpose for which it was given.
I hear your frustration about the slowness of implementation and I sympathize. But I don't want you to believe FlaggedRevs is being deliberately held up: it isn't.
Thanks, Sue -----Original Message----- From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:59:44 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation.
Please help me understand the implications of this statement.
It simply means that
a) we want to make sure that for the production roll-out, the user interface is not insane and appropriate to the specific en.wp configuration that's been proposed;
Aren't our volunteers qualified to contribute to this?
b) we'll want to track participation metrics after the roll-out to see what the impact of this technology is.
I'm not sure what after the fact analysis has to do with the deployment schedule.
Accusations of "obstructionism" don't help; I understand where these come from, but it's a massive case of assume bad faith. Please stop it.
"Bad faith" — I don't think those words means what you think they mean.
I don't think anyone at the WMF is acting in bad faith. Surely if you intended to harm Wiki(p|m)edia you could come up with something better than this.
My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki that there simply hasn't been time to even make a simple configuration change; ghat WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project, or that the WMF staff has decided that it knows better than hundreds of contributors and that it needed to act paternalistic and protect the community against its own decision by ignoring it. I am not the only person to harbor these concerns, for example see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_... .
All off of these can be supported by the facts in front of me; None of them reflect very positively on Wikimedia's staff, but neither require even an ounce of bad faith.
If "assume good faith" has become a code-word for "pretend everything is done perfectly; ignore problems; provide no criticism" then it's an aspect of our culture that needs to be eliminated.
I felt the latter hypothesis was supported by your statement that "we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation". Even with your clarification I can't help but understand that when I ask 'Why is FOO being delayed' and you respond (in part) 'Because we are concerned that it will harm things' that you aren't saying that you're intending to obstruct the deployment...
Extracting the purest (strawman?) form of statement: "It has not been done yet, in part, because we think what the community decided may harm participation. However, we aren't working with the community to ameliorate this harm" is pretty much the definition of obstruction.
This is precisely the thing I was talking about when I said that I'm concerned that Wikimedia is treating the contributors as 'users' rather than partners: If there are concerns about negative side-effects of an initiative with a partner, you talk them out and find solutions, you don't drag your feet on implementing and hope the demand goes away— though some organizations find that to be an acceptable approach to handling needy customers.
If Wikimedia were more communicative about limitations and timelines and more responsive to requests there wouldn't be as much need or room to speculate.
_______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
2009/9/28 Sue Gardner susanpgardner@gmail.com:
Greg, I really don't want to reply to the specifics of this conversation -- Brion and Erik and others are much more deeply involved, and therefore better situated to respond.
But I will say this: I know some people have speculated, or asked, if the Wikimedia Foundation is deliberately holding up implementation of FlaggedRevs in English Wikipedia, because the staff doesn't want it, or thinks it's a bad idea. For the record: we are not.
I personally am worried that an aggressive deployment of FlaggedRevs may act as a barrier to new participants. The statistics for new editors on the German Wikipedia seem to suggest that their implementation has in fact caused a decline in new editors. I find that worrying. But I realize that 1) there may be other factors at play on the German Wikipedia, affecting participation, that are unrelated to FlaggedRevs,
I was looking at those stats just a couple of days ago and it seems the decline started a month *before* the implementation of FlaggedRevs on dewiki, so it would seem to be due to something else. (Unless there is some error in my data.)
2009/9/28 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
"Bad faith" — I don't think those words means what you think they mean.
If it was our intention to not implement Flagged Protection, then we (WMF) wouldn't have said the opposite publicly. Instead, we would be communicating about why we're not implementing it. Our only communication about this has been, and will always be, straightforward.
It's your right to question allocation of resources. I would ask you to keep in mind that a) some resources are allocated in a fixed manner due to the funding source (e.g. usability), b) just because you can spend successfully in one department, doesn't mean you can spend successfully in another, c) initiatives like the strategy process are essential precisely to do the best possible job to choose between many competing priorities, all of which are very important to their respective petitioners. As I said, there's quite a bit of foundational growth that needs to happen in the tech department to improve responsiveness and capacity of the core team. Referrals are welcome.
As for FlaggedRevs, we'll whip the prototype into shape ASAP and take it from there.
I think I can sum this up in a reasonably NPOV way.
We in the community very very badly want this to happen as quickly as possible. We had a very long discussion and came to an overwhelming consensus. We feel frustrated that it is taking so long.
We on the Foundation side of things very very badly want this to happen as quickly as possible. For a variety of reasons, including that there is specific funding for some projects, but not for this one, some obvious ways to make this happen faster haven't happened yet.
Everyone on all sides is interested and concerned to know what the impact of this will be on a variety of metrics: general quality, participation overall, participation by newbies, reduction of BLP harm, etc. Everyone is agreed that the trial should happen and then be judged rationally, in a data-driven way, and the configuration changed and retested if there appear to be better ways to do it.
Now we can quibble about the details of what should have been done already (and I think it is clear that things have not been perfect, but then again, things have never been perfect anywhere, and yet we muddle through :-) ). But mostly I hope we focus on what we should do NOW.
If the Foundation is bottlenecked at the moment (understandable) then how can I help, how can we the community help, to take some of the burden off of them to get done what we need to get done for the sake of our mission? :-)
--Jimbo
2009/9/28 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com:
If the Foundation is bottlenecked at the moment (understandable) then how can I help, how can we the community help, to take some of the burden off of them to get done what we need to get done for the sake of our mission? :-)
The process going forward is pretty clear -
a) make sure prototype setup reflects desired behavior as per the en.wp proposal and invite broader testing; b) make revisions to extension based on public and internal review with a particular eye to usability; c) ensure that the extension is fully scalable to en.wp traffic volume; d) deploy on en.wp as per proposal (potentially, per c, initially in some scale-limited fashion).
Brion's going to look into the prototype situation ASAP, and we have a scheduled call with Aaron later this week to talk about any obvious changes that he can focus on immediately. The most obvious way for people to help is to give feedback during the testing period. Beyond that, I would ask for patience and goodwill as we're managing many competing priorities right now, and things are pretty stressful.
Sounds great!
Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/9/28 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com:
If the Foundation is bottlenecked at the moment (understandable) then how can I help, how can we the community help, to take some of the burden off of them to get done what we need to get done for the sake of our mission? :-)
The process going forward is pretty clear -
a) make sure prototype setup reflects desired behavior as per the en.wp proposal and invite broader testing; b) make revisions to extension based on public and internal review with a particular eye to usability; c) ensure that the extension is fully scalable to en.wp traffic volume; d) deploy on en.wp as per proposal (potentially, per c, initially in some scale-limited fashion).
Brion's going to look into the prototype situation ASAP, and we have a scheduled call with Aaron later this week to talk about any obvious changes that he can focus on immediately. The most obvious way for people to help is to give feedback during the testing period. Beyond that, I would ask for patience and goodwill as we're managing many competing priorities right now, and things are pretty stressful.
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2009/9/28 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com:
If the Foundation is bottlenecked at the moment (understandable) then how can I help, how can we the community help, to take some of the burden off of them to get done what we need to get done for the sake of our mission? :-)
The process going forward is pretty clear -
a) make sure prototype setup reflects desired behavior as per the en.wp proposal and invite broader testing; b) make revisions to extension based on public and internal review with a particular eye to usability; c) ensure that the extension is fully scalable to en.wp traffic volume; d) deploy on en.wp as per proposal (potentially, per c, initially in some scale-limited fashion).
Brion's going to look into the prototype situation ASAP, and we have a scheduled call with Aaron later this week to talk about any obvious changes that he can focus on immediately. The most obvious way for people to help is to give feedback during the testing period. Beyond that, I would ask for patience and goodwill as we're managing many competing priorities right now, and things are pretty stressful.
One thing to note...
The Foundation and its ops staff are the people we the community trust to keep the site running and upgraded.
Keeping the site running - being responsible and making sure that changes are properly tested, don't introduce failures, etc - often conflicts with keeping the site (software) updated/upgraded to the latest tools or features.
As someone who both deals with BLP issues for which flagged revisions, and does web operations as my day job, I understand this tension. It's natural. But it's also healthy that the foundation / ops staff are taking their time about it.
I understand that a lot of people may be frustrated by the delay. In my professional opinion, it's the Foundation doing the right thing, pacing upgrades as confidence is built that the ops impact will be handled appropriately.
If we take the site down for very long we'll get on CNN, for all the wrong reasons. Web ops staff's goal in life should be to avoid being on CNN 8-)
Gregory, To address:
"My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki...WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project.."
I don't want to start a big debate about a small point, but you seem to be assuming that FlaggedRevs is of a higher priority to most volunteers than the usability project or the strategy initiative.
I think it's important to remember that we're a huge organization with diverse (to put it mildly) opinions on what is most important at the moment. Both our strategy for the future and usability improvements are projects near and dear to the hearts of many volunteers, myself included. Anyone with the impression that it's only those handing out big grants who care about this work is mistaken.
Many thanks to folks from the Foundation for responding quickly to the request for a FlaggedRevs update.
Steven Walling
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:53 PM, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
I think I can sum this up in a reasonably NPOV way.
We in the community very very badly want this to happen as quickly as possible. We had a very long discussion and came to an overwhelming consensus. We feel frustrated that it is taking so long.
We on the Foundation side of things very very badly want this to happen as quickly as possible. For a variety of reasons, including that there is specific funding for some projects, but not for this one, some obvious ways to make this happen faster haven't happened yet.
Everyone on all sides is interested and concerned to know what the impact of this will be on a variety of metrics: general quality, participation overall, participation by newbies, reduction of BLP harm, etc. Everyone is agreed that the trial should happen and then be judged rationally, in a data-driven way, and the configuration changed and retested if there appear to be better ways to do it.
Now we can quibble about the details of what should have been done already (and I think it is clear that things have not been perfect, but then again, things have never been perfect anywhere, and yet we muddle through :-) ). But mostly I hope we focus on what we should do NOW.
If the Foundation is bottlenecked at the moment (understandable) then how can I help, how can we the community help, to take some of the burden off of them to get done what we need to get done for the sake of our mission? :-)
--Jimbo
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Gregory, To address:
"My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki...WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project.."
Your quoting makes it sound like I'm calling usability and strategy wiki niche interest.
Here is what I actually wrote:
"My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki that there simply hasn't been time to even make a simple configuration change; ghat WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project, or that the"
In bullet point form, my theories were:
(1) Tech staff is so overloaded with new work from usability, etc. that they can't make a small configuration change for enwp or an enwp test. No matter how important these new initiatives are, if they are overburdening the staff this greatly than we have bitten off more than we can chew. (2) That WMF no longer cares about EnWP because advocates for other projects post almost daily on foundation-l while ENWP disproportionally underrepresented. (Enwp is off in it's own land) (3) That fears about flagged revisions were causing the WMF to delay.
I'm pleased that Sue has responded resolutely to clarify that (3) is not her position.
In any case, please endeavor to not misquote me in this manner in the future.
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with de.wp,
Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet. I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have not yet been added to the test wiki at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation.
Please help me understand the implications of this statement.
The English Wikipedia reached an overwhelmingly strong decision to try a particular mode of operation. I hope you can appreciate how difficult it can be to balance various interest and achieve agreement on a change with such a widespread impact on a project as large and well established as EnWP.
Enhancements were made to the software by volunteers to support the proposal and a configuration was designed. Since then there has been almost no progress in turning up a public trial wiki with this configuration for testing and further refinement.
Now, "we" (I do know know for whom you speak) are concerned about an underspecified concern regarding a negative impact on participation. So? Now what? Does the now staff obstruct the rollout with passive resistance and year+ delays? Based both on the actions thus far and on your statement this is what it sounds like to me.
Is this sort of over-concern regarding participation, so paranoid that it obstructs a simple time limited trial of an article selective feature, the behavior we can now expect from the WMF now that it has substantial funding tied to unspecified participation goals?
I too am concerned about participation: I'm concerned that people who came to build a project together will not want to participate under a Wikimedia Foundation which views its contributors as 'users' rather than partners.
Reaching a design for the policy and configuration and educating and convincing people is the result of thousands of hours of volunteer labor from hundreds of people across several years. Moreover, the ability to reach a decision to try something at this scale is a ray of hope that EnWP hasn't become totally stuck and immune to change. All of this is wasted if the Wikimedia Foundation isn't able or willing to hold up its side of its partnership with the community.
The user interface is well-suited for the current de.wp implementation, but needs some TLC to work for the "flagged protection" use case.
The community has largely taken care of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revi...
Of course, there will need to be additional refinement but that can not proceed until the test wiki is up.
We're committed to getting there but at this stage I can't give you a better promise than allocating some percentage of the core team to supporting the UI development, testing, and production roll-out, hopefully resulting in a full production roll-out prior to the end of this year.
When will the test wiki be activated? This requires something like pasting 25 lines of configuration, an extension install, and kicking a maintenance script.
Even if everything else is delayed having the text site up and running would allow the community to test and provide feedback to volunteer developers who can refine the software in advance of the availability of resources for the large scale deployment.
Greg, why can't we just put the code up on the Toolserver? Why does the foundation need to be involved at all?
On 9/28/09 1:04 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Erik Moellererik@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with de.wp,
Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet. I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have not yet been added to the test wiki at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
That config has been there for a month, but it might be broken in some way; as far as I know nobody's yet done any organized poking at the test site. We'll look it over in the next few days...
-- brion
On 9/28/09 4:18 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
On 9/28/09 1:04 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Erik Moellererik@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with de.wp,
Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet. I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have not yet been added to the test wiki at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
That config has been there for a month, but it might be broken in some way; as far as I know nobody's yet done any organized poking at the test site. We'll look it over in the next few days...
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Quick steps to try it out:
1) Find a nice page:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Vince_%282005%29
2) Hit the 'protect' link:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hurricane_Vince_%282...
3) "This page does not have a stable version; page stability settings can be configured." <- click this link [ideally that next form will be better integrated into the protection form in future]
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Stabilizatio...
^ At this point if you're an admin you can tweak the "page stabilization settings" which allows you to opt a page into FlaggedRevs.
Switching it in for thie page to "The stable revision; if not present, then the current/draft one", I now see the little 'sighted' box on the article page and have the review interface at the bottom (though some of the UI elements haven't been fully customized yet).
-- brion
On 9/28/09 4:57 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
- "This page does not have a stable version; page stability settings
can be configured."<- click this link [ideally that next form will be better integrated into the protection form in future]
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Stabilizatio...
^ At this point if you're an admin you can tweak the "page stabilization settings" which allows you to opt a page into FlaggedRevs.
Switching it in for thie page to "The stable revision; if not present, then the current/draft one", I now see the little 'sighted' box on the article page and have the review interface at the bottom (though some of the UI elements haven't been fully customized yet).
And note there's a 'Stability' tab in Special:Preferences to tweak your personal prefs for viewing stable vs draft versions and how to show the interface.
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences
-- brion
On 9/28/09 4:57 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
Switching it in for thie page to "The stable revision; if not present, then the current/draft one", I now see the little 'sighted' box on the article page and have the review interface at the bottom (though some of the UI elements haven't been fully customized yet).
I've added notes to these effects with sample links on the main page: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
-- brion
I also forwarded this to the English Wikipedia mailing list...
Brion Vibber wrote:
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Quick steps to try it out:
- Find a nice page:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Vince_%282005%29
- Hit the 'protect' link:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hurricane_Vince_%282...
- "This page does not have a stable version; page stability settings
can be configured." <- click this link [ideally that next form will be better integrated into the protection form in future]
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Stabilizatio...
^ At this point if you're an admin you can tweak the "page stabilization settings" which allows you to opt a page into FlaggedRevs.
Switching it in for thie page to "The stable revision; if not present, then the current/draft one", I now see the little 'sighted' box on the article page and have the review interface at the bottom (though some of the UI elements haven't been fully customized yet).
-- brion
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 9/28/09 5:15 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I also forwarded this to the English Wikipedia mailing list...
Yay! :)
Also added on the tech blog:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/
-- brion
Brion Vibber wrote:
On 9/28/09 5:15 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I also forwarded this to the English Wikipedia mailing list...
Yay! :)
Also added on the tech blog:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/
Actually it bounced, on account of I am not a subscriber there now, and I've gotta run so hopefully someone else will do that for me. :)
On 9/28/09 5:19 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
On 9/28/09 5:15 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I also forwarded this to the English Wikipedia mailing list...
Yay! :)
Also added on the tech blog:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/
Actually it bounced, on account of I am not a subscriber there now, and I've gotta run so hopefully someone else will do that for me. :)
I've made a post on wikien-l for ya. :)
-- brion
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet. I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have not yet been added to the test wiki at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
That config has been there for a month, but it might be broken in some way; as far as I know nobody's yet done any organized poking at the test site. We'll look it over in the next few days...
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Holy crap!
In my defense: It's pretty clear that no one was aware that it was turned up yet.
The notice indicated that things were still being setup.
Activating it requires a right that only you have at the moment: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&am... [if there is anyone but brion listed; they've since been added]
The bugzilla bug has not been updated: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18334
Other people inquired about the test site: May 5, May 12, Jun 9, Jun 19, Jul 16th I inquired about this several times on wikitech-l: Aug 31 and Sep 1, then privately on Sep 15 and Sep 20th. Of course, people have inquired on EnWP itself too.
As pointed out by Philippe, it came up in the 09/25 office hours IRC which included these gems:
(I've cut ruthlessly, original is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-09-25) ---- [22:33pm] Natalie: SueGardner: What is the hold-up with flagged revisions on the English Wikipedia? It's been months and months. ... [22:39pm] Jake_Wartenberg: brion: so there is no flagged protection on flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org [22:39pm] Jake_Wartenberg: just flagged revs [22:40pm] cary: I think that's enough on Flagged Revs. ----
Had I been aware of the discussion on IRC I would have first nagged you again about why you were saying it was there when it didn't appear to be!
Thank you. My apologies: I'd have had little reason to complain if I'd know that the test was up; the absence of the test is what seemed outrageous.
On 9/28/09 5:23 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Holy crap!
In my defense: It's pretty clear that no one was aware that it was turned up yet.
The notice indicated that things were still being setup.
Totally fair -- there was just plain bad communication there! We've got things going now and folks are getting set up with local admin & crat accounts to start poking it, so it looks like we've got this finally resolved. :)
-- brion
But not established users ?
-----Original Message----- From: Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, Sep 28, 2009 5:36 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
On 9/28/09 5:23 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Holy crap!
In my defense: It's pretty clear that no one was aware that it was turned up yet.
The notice indicated that things were still being setup.
Totally fair -- there was just plain bad communication there! We've got things going now and folks are getting set up with local admin & crat accounts to start poking it, so it looks like we've got this finally resolved. :)
-- brion
_______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
You cut off the response.? I was responding directly to the post previous where it was stated that crats and admins could poke at this.? So I'm wondering why not open it to all established editors.? There are editors who have been around a long time and are not admins.
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, Sep 28, 2009 5:56 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
2009/9/29 wjhonson@aol.com:
But not established users ?
Not established users what?
_______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
2009/9/29 wjhonson@aol.com:
You cut off the response.? I was responding directly to the post previous where it was stated that crats and admins could poke at this.? So I'm wondering why not open it to all established editors.? There are editors who have been around a long time and are not admins.
You misunderstood - people are being made admins and crats on that wiki so they can poke at it. Anyone can request admin powers there.
Thanks.? Ok I've found you do that now. http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Adminship_requests
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, Sep 28, 2009 6:13 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
2009/9/29 wjhonson@aol.com:
?You cut off the response.? I was responding directly to the post previous
where it was stated that crats and admins could poke at this.? So I'm wondering why not open it to all established editors.? There are editors who have been around a long time and are not admins.
You misunderstood - people are being made admins and crats on that wiki so they can poke at it. Anyone can request admin powers there.
_______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
2009/9/29 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org:
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Quick steps to try it out: [snip]
Where do you want comments? I'll put the one I have so far here:
What does "Confirm stable version settings" mean? It looks like an expiration time, but that doesn't fit the name...
2009/9/29 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/9/29 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org:
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Quick steps to try it out: [snip]
Where do you want comments? I'll put the one I have so far here:
What does "Confirm stable version settings" mean? It looks like an expiration time, but that doesn't fit the name...
Ah, it makes a little more sense once you have admin powers and rest of the settings appear. I would change the name, though, only the "Confirm" button in that section has anything to do with confirmation.
On 9/28/09 5:27 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/9/29 Brion Vibberbrion@wikimedia.org:
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Quick steps to try it out: [snip]
Where do you want comments? I'll put the one I have so far here:
What does "Confirm stable version settings" mean? It looks like an expiration time, but that doesn't fit the name...
For the moment let's just start at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page but probably we should break that out to some more discussion pages.
We know we need to do some UI cleanup in response to user testing, so comments like this are extremely welcome! [And if you see some <flagged-blahblah> crap on the screen sometimes; some of the messages still need to be customized locally by admins. It might be nice to clean that up to have better defaults too, though.]
-- brion
2009/9/29 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org:
On 9/28/09 5:27 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/9/29 Brion Vibberbrion@wikimedia.org:
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Quick steps to try it out: [snip]
Where do you want comments? I'll put the one I have so far here:
What does "Confirm stable version settings" mean? It looks like an expiration time, but that doesn't fit the name...
For the moment let's just start at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page but probably we should break that out to some more discussion pages.
Ok, I've made a couple of comments there.
We know we need to do some UI cleanup in response to user testing, so comments like this are extremely welcome! [And if you see some <flagged-blahblah> crap on the screen sometimes; some of the messages still need to be customized locally by admins. It might be nice to clean that up to have better defaults too, though.]
Without some defaults it is difficult to know what they are meant to be (otherwise I would put some useful placeholder text there). The current defaults seem to use "validated" and "sighted" as synonyms, which seems unwise, unless I am misinterpreting something.
2009/9/28 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org:
It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them.
Thanks for looking into it, Brion.
I don't really have authority to enable large extensions on large projects.
Also if there are UI improvements needed, then I'll need specific requests so I know what to do.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Sue,
I sent the below included inquiry to wikitech-l regarding http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/.
Now almost a month later I still have received no response regarding the status of this test deployment. It is is still not active on the test site, — although this has literally gone on for months.
As far as I can tell this is one of the most significant initiatives on English Wikipedia as of lately— in that it has site wide impact and the design and decision of the configuration was the work of hundreds of people, including a reworking after the WMF staff refused to implement the initial decision which only achieved almost a decent majority support, for lack of sufficient community support. Now that the plan has been improved and the support is overwhelming a commitment to roll with this plan was made but no progress appears to be being made. Inquiries have been met with silence.
I believe the community expects and deserves a greater level of responsiveness from the staff of Wikimedia.
What I'd like to know— What is delaying this deployment? What is a reasonable expectation for the timeline in implement community chosen decisions? How can communication be improved so that the communities high priority implementations aren't ignored for weeks and even months by wikimedia staff? How can the people who care about this help see it through to completion?
What does this say about the enormous strategic projects initiate when Wikimedia is already failing to meet its commitments on high impact community initiatives?
Thank you for your time and consideration.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com Date: Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:21 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org Status? To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:17 PM, K. Peacheyp858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 7:02 AM, PlatonidesPlatonides@gmail.com wrote:
You know, when you point to a broken page, people^W wikipedians tend to do absurd things like fixing them :)
I was going to fix some up, but import is restricted and i was too lazy to do copy/paste imports.
Ehhh. It don't know that it makes sense to spend effort manually fixing pages on a test project. If the import procedure is not working right it should be improved...
In any case, I'm sorry for the tangent. The main intent of my post was to determine the current status:
Is the import finished? When will the configuration changes for flagged protection be turned on?
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org