Hey Milos, You talked about things that I'm in no place to comment but I want to emphasize on this part of your email: "For the last 8 years, just two things have been working without problems in WMF: Money and tech infrastructure (servers, "plain" MediaWiki, optimizations etc.)." We hear about technical issues of Wikipedia a lot. We hear Wikipedia is behind in technology, that it's underperforming. etc. etc. It's not just you. It's a lot of people in the community of editors too. I highly doubt that I can comment on this matter, there are definitely better people but I can't keep it anymore. Maybe my perspective as a non-WMF employee who works in technical issues would be worth publishing.
The process of getting something technical done is as the same as editing in wiki. It needs a certain amount of expertise like editing most of the articles as well. Anyone can make a patch for every part of Wikipedia and after some code review. it's there. IMO saying "technical parts of Wikipedia sucks" is as the same as "Wikipedia sucks". Technical space of Wikimedia is filled with volunteers. I saw unimaginable times that people work over the weekend, take a day off and then work again because unlike most companies people care about their job in a good way. Helping in technical issues just need passion and caring. Let me tell you a story. I didn't know how to write a line of code in my first three years of editing Wikipedia. I was just a teenage boy who was making articles about movies he watched, songs he liked, etc. and then I cared about Wikipedia so much that I wanted to help more and I heard about cool things called robots (and believe me, for a very long time I thought bots are physical things that edit Wikipedia) so I tried to read about it, there was virtually no help in Persian and my English was so bad that I needed dictionary for everything I read (google translate was a sci-fi idea back then) but I learned and learned and I'm still learning just to make Wikipedia a better place, I hate programming as a goal, it's just a mean.
I just want to remind you people done a hell out of job in technical aspects. It wasn't just in their working time. It was also a huge volunteer time too, either by staff or non-WMF employees. Feeling this advantages is not hard. Just take a look at Google's Knol. It was done by *the* Google and it's this. We, as a movement, are competing with companies like Google, Facebook or twitter the same way we are competing with Britannica. Honestly, I think if someone just published a statement saying "There is a cool project called Knowledge Engine but we don't have money for it, We can just give you a space to put your source code and test it, and running it." We would be knocking over google by 2020, as what we did with Britannica.
I think, maybe I'm wrong please correct me if I am, the biggest problem is the user interface design of Wikipedia. It looks boring. I know there were, and there are great designers who also love Wikipedia the same way you do. I saw what they are capable of. Look at Winter or preferences redesign [1]. They are capable of making Wikipedia ten times more user-friendly and beautiful. I don't know why it hasn't happened, maybe the community is too conservative, maybe it's some kind of branding. I asked my life partner and he said Wikipedia looks beautiful to the most of its readers, the same way a fresh cupcake smells good, because Wikipedia is awesome. I guess people who work in bakeries doesn't like the smell of cupcakes as much as other people.
My last words: If you encounter any technical issues, please report and if you think it's important to solve technical problems you are more than welcome to join the club. Just check out the developer hub [2] and there are tons of manuals in the internet, also there are people in IRC channels willing to help.
[1]: It aches my heart every time I see it: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Redesign_user_preference...
[2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_hub
I hope more people chime in and comment to fix this misconception or correct me. Best
+1 for "saying 'technical parts of Wikipedia sucks' is as the same as 'Wikipedia sucks' ". +1 for "the biggest problem is the user interface design of Wikipedia" and your Winter-related thoughts (I may be also wrong).
Thanks for all the message.
On 20 February 2016 at 03:02, Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
Hey Milos, You talked about things that I'm in no place to comment but I want to emphasize on this part of your email: "For the last 8 years, just two things have been working without problems in WMF: Money and tech infrastructure (servers, "plain" MediaWiki, optimizations etc.)." We hear about technical issues of Wikipedia a lot. We hear Wikipedia is behind in technology, that it's underperforming. etc. etc. It's not just you. It's a lot of people in the community of editors too. I highly doubt that I can comment on this matter, there are definitely better people but I can't keep it anymore. Maybe my perspective as a non-WMF employee who works in technical issues would be worth publishing.
The process of getting something technical done is as the same as editing in wiki. It needs a certain amount of expertise like editing most of the articles as well. Anyone can make a patch for every part of Wikipedia and after some code review. it's there. IMO saying "technical parts of Wikipedia sucks" is as the same as "Wikipedia sucks". Technical space of Wikimedia is filled with volunteers. I saw unimaginable times that people work over the weekend, take a day off and then work again because unlike most companies people care about their job in a good way. Helping in technical issues just need passion and caring. Let me tell you a story. I didn't know how to write a line of code in my first three years of editing Wikipedia. I was just a teenage boy who was making articles about movies he watched, songs he liked, etc. and then I cared about Wikipedia so much that I wanted to help more and I heard about cool things called robots (and believe me, for a very long time I thought bots are physical things that edit Wikipedia) so I tried to read about it, there was virtually no help in Persian and my English was so bad that I needed dictionary for everything I read (google translate was a sci-fi idea back then) but I learned and learned and I'm still learning just to make Wikipedia a better place, I hate programming as a goal, it's just a mean.
I just want to remind you people done a hell out of job in technical aspects. It wasn't just in their working time. It was also a huge volunteer time too, either by staff or non-WMF employees. Feeling this advantages is not hard. Just take a look at Google's Knol. It was done by *the* Google and it's this. We, as a movement, are competing with companies like Google, Facebook or twitter the same way we are competing with Britannica. Honestly, I think if someone just published a statement saying "There is a cool project called Knowledge Engine but we don't have money for it, We can just give you a space to put your source code and test it, and running it." We would be knocking over google by 2020, as what we did with Britannica.
I think, maybe I'm wrong please correct me if I am, the biggest problem is the user interface design of Wikipedia. It looks boring. I know there were, and there are great designers who also love Wikipedia the same way you do. I saw what they are capable of. Look at Winter or preferences redesign [1]. They are capable of making Wikipedia ten times more user-friendly and beautiful. I don't know why it hasn't happened, maybe the community is too conservative, maybe it's some kind of branding. I asked my life partner and he said Wikipedia looks beautiful to the most of its readers, the same way a fresh cupcake smells good, because Wikipedia is awesome. I guess people who work in bakeries doesn't like the smell of cupcakes as much as other people.
My last words: If you encounter any technical issues, please report and if you think it's important to solve technical problems you are more than welcome to join the club. Just check out the developer hub [2] and there are tons of manuals in the internet, also there are people in IRC channels willing to help.
[1]: It aches my heart every time I see it:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Redesign_user_preference...
I hope more people chime in and comment to fix this misconception or correct me. Best _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Amir, this email is so quotable it hurts.
"There is a cool project called Knowledge Engine but we don't have money
for it,
We can just give you a space to put your source code and test it, and
running it."
Please to launch all future projects this way.
I asked my life partner and he said Wikipedia looks beautiful to the most
of its readers, the same way
a fresh cupcake smells good, because Wikipedia is awesome. I guess people who
work in bakeries
doesn't like the smell of cupcakes as much as other people.
+++++. True, and made me smile.
On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 3:02 AM, Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
You talked about things that I'm in no place to comment but I want to emphasize on this part of your email: "For the last 8 years, just two things have been working without problems in WMF: Money and tech infrastructure (servers, "plain" MediaWiki, optimizations etc.)." We hear about technical issues of Wikipedia a lot. We hear Wikipedia is behind in technology, that it's underperforming. etc. etc. It's not just you. It's a lot of people in the community of editors too. I highly doubt that I can comment on this matter, there are definitely better people but I can't keep it anymore. Maybe my perspective as a non-WMF employee who works in technical issues would be worth publishing. ...
Just to be clear, as mails like my previous one could be wrongly understood, obviously.
I said "without problems" vs. "with problems", not "competent" vs. "incompetent" or "good" vs. "bad" etc. Both money and infrastructure have been no issues for almost a decade (servers longer than money). I am not waking up with the thought that Wikimedia won't have enough money or that servers wouldn't work. (OK, there are some invisible things, like accounting, which obviously haven't been a problem at any point of time.)
Everything else has been a kind of problem, but I wasn't going into details. If we are talking about MediaWiki itself, the core is going with infrastructure and it's no issue. In relation to the features, which are the problem, it's related to the articulation of the needed features and allocating resources to create them. Thus, it's the problem of upper management. I know we have a lot of quite competent developers.
But I didn't want to go into this kind of analysis. In some cases the causes are obvious, in some other they are not. I just wanted to detect that, besides very limited number of no issues, we have tons of problems, the most of them being the same as a decade ago.
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