Hello Dan!

I only described what some reactions were. It has an origin, the background: For some years people on nl-wiki have been very enthusiastic about the idea of a Visual Editor, the community liked it very much and wanted it very much. When the Visual Editor came live on the Dutch Wikipedia, users were very enthusiastic about it and wanted to try it, but very soon after bugs after bugs after bugs after bugs appeared. On request of the team of the Visual Editor we had before the deployment already a feedback page, it is still loaded with bugs, all reported to the team, but still none have been fixed. The Visual Editor makes a really mess of too many pages. The developers of VE planned some time later to deploy the next step of the Visual Editor and making the VE not opt-in but the standard editor for everyone. Besides having promised an opt-out, which other projects did not get and the trust in the VE team was harmed a lot, almost all the bugs that we have reported are still not fixed, even just before the scheduled deployment. The Dutch community got much demotivated and lost even more trust because of this and held a voting about this situation which made clear that the existing VE was absolutely not ready to be made available for everyone, and that on a project were people would welcome a good Visual Editor very very much. This was a huge disappointment. What this disappointment made even worse was that the bugs weren't fixed, and the community got some kind of car salesman from WMF which tried to sell a broken product, which annoyed even more and gave the feeling the community is the idiot, while with the feedback which was given nobody has done anything. The Dutch community is used to changes and some normal annoyance that they have to change habits or fix broken things again and again, but the situation with VE is considered the worst implementation ever on Wikipedia of the past decade. It gave users the feeling that WMF doesn't care for the needs of users who daily do the actual work which makes Wikipedia a success, gave the feeling that WMF things that sticking to a plan is more important than really solving the issues the local users met, and made users feel WMF/developers as unreliable and untrustworthy. This is still in peoples minds after months like a nightmare and still is frustrating.

Earlier this year the community of nl-wiki adopted very quick Wikidata as new way of working and also the Notifications tool (Flow) was adopted rapidly with much excitement in September (even while both are not the most optimal and still have bugs).

So yes, it is illogical that some users want the VE first ready, but that is the result of a long desired wish to have a fully working VE which apparently is considered a larger need than a better search. I constantly keep trying to inform the community about why, how, when, etc to get a better picture of technical changes. Lucky most users understand that both pieces of software are independent of each other and really like to move on and have the software improved, including the search.

Romaine

--- tech ambassador for nl-wiki

Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:21:50 +0000 From: Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org To: "Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects"     wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Would any other wikis like to try     out a new search? Message-ID:     CAOW03ME9F_51DuXq0qy1ziJHRLkQfcocwmSc7ZP8d58gE9-Spw@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

It's a little illogical to say no to search on the basis that VE should be fixed first. The engineers involved in search are not involved in VE at all, and saying no to search does not mean that they'll be reassigned to the VE instead. Alas, people can be illogical sometimes.

Thanks very much for relaying the results of the straw poll you ran, Romaine!

Dan

On 27 October 2013 00:27, Romaine Wiki romaine_wiki@yahoo.com wrote:

Hello Nik,

About a week ago I explained the nl-wikipedia community

on the central

discussion page about your message and asked them the

question.

The result of the short poll is 19 users say yes to

test, 4 say no, 2 say

neutral. In general they experience the current search limited

and would like to

see it improved. 2 of who say no have no problems with

the current search

and say that something does not need to be fixed if it

isn't broken, while

the visual editor should be fixed first as that one is

broken much more on

nl-wiki (yes the VE is a huge problem with messing up

pages, but that is

another subject). Apparently those two do not have the

experience that the

search is limited. Two others say no as they have had

worse experiences

with the visual editor (just as everyone else on

nl-wiki: we had a poll on

VE which clearly stated that the VE was absolutely

working worse and hit a

big gap in the trust in the developers), and would like

to be assured that

the new search isn't having too big bugs that disrupt

searching normally.

In general saying there is a large majority for

testing. Certainly for

secondary testing at first, if it is stable enough also

for testing in

primary modus.

Romaine

---

tech ambassador for nl-wiki

[Wikitech-ambassadors] Would any other wikis like to

try out a new search?

Nikolas Everett neverett at wikimedia.org Thu Oct 17 19:49:08 UTC 2013

Dear Ambassadors,

I'm looking for volunteer wikis to try out the new

search that Chad and

I've been working on called CirrusSearch.

<sales pitch>Be a part of the second wave of

wikis and influence new search

features!</sales pitch>

Reality:

• We're reasonably sure CirrusSearch's language support

is better than the

current search.  [1]

• CirrusSearch indexes expanded templates.
• CirrusSearch indexes articles within a few seconds of

when they are

changed.  Articles that contain a changed template

take longer but they are

also updated.

• Most of the special search syntax is the same.

You can read the syntax

here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search/CirrusSearchFeatures

What it means to volunteer: If you volunteer your wiki we'll turn CirrusSearch on

in "secondary" mode

where it'll keep itself up to date but all queries will

still go through

the old search.  You'll be able to get search

results from the new search

engine for comparison by adding a url parameter to the

search results

page.  If you and the community that you represent

aren't immediately blown

away by how much better it works we'll work with you to

make it awesome.

At some point, shortly after the new search has been

deemed awesome, we'll

switch CirrusSearch to "primary" mode and all queries

will go through it.

You'll be able to get at the old search results with a

url parameter

similar to the one that you used to test

CirrusSearch.  If anything goes

wrong we'll switch you back to the old search.

We'll keep that option open

for a few months.

So who is ready to help make search better?

Nik Everett

[1]: Some languages (20ish) will see a huge improvement

because

CirrusSearch understands their grammar and old search

doesn't.  Many other

languages will see an improvement because CirrusSearch

is happy to search

all kinds of character sets while the current search

isn't.  Esperanto is

very well supported by the old search so would get

worse.  eo wikis should

probably wait until we've improved support.

---

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-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform Wikimedia Foundation