[This didn't send the first time, trying again]
Re: Ryan Lane
>That said, a number of the points are misguided. FlaggedRevs is a poor
>example to be used by either the foundation or the community.
>FlaggedRevs is a perfect example of how design by committee (where the
>committee is the community) utterly fails. FlaggedRevs should be used
>by both the foundation and the community as an example of a project
>that failed because the community designed something by committee and
>the foundation went along with those plans. We should never forget
>this lesson.
>
>LiquidThreads was also originally community designed. The maintainer
>added every feature under the sun that the community requested, which
>lead it to become a bloated and difficult to maintain piece of
>software...
I most definitely agree - WONTFIXING a request that is a "bad idea" is
just as important as fixing bugs, or implementing the good ideas. The
art is of course in being able to determine what constitutes a "bad
idea" and a "good idea". Its also important to keep in mind the
community is full of many people with different conflicting goals, you
can't blame them for requesting bad ideas or things they don't
actually want. (Just to be 100% clear, I'm not saying that you (or
anyone else) is blaming the community for that, just making the point)
>I think the major problem with the Op-Ed is that he points the blame
>fully at the foundation when the blame is a combination of the
>foundation and the community. A major part of the problem is that the
>feedback from the community is almost always purely negative, and this
>Op-Ed is another example of that.
I would disagree that all feedback from the community is negative. I
often get positive feedback from the community. Positive feedback in
my experience seems to most often happen for small bug fix type
changes, but I have seen it for larger changes as well. Then again I'm
a volunteer, so which side of the us vs them fence I fall on seems to
vary.
If a foundation project is solely receiving negative feedback, then
perhaps that is the community trying to tell the foundation something.
>The flip side of that is that the
>foundation communicates very poorly with the community. It's difficult
>to effectively communicate with the community because our
>communication tools suck. Our communication tools suck because it's
>very difficult to change them because it's difficult to get the
>community to agree with changes. Welcome to the vicious circle.
Quite frankly, the communication tools don't suck that much. It seems
that no one really uses them. When was the last time a developer
posted on the village pump asking for user feedback, or notifying
users of a change, or otherwise talking to the users? We don't even have
messages about upcoming deployments anymore [I guess that's
because they're so frequent it might be considered spam?]. Sure there's the
occasional message, but not much. Although jorm's op-ed didn't meet
with a full 100% positive response, it did seem to be a good step in
the right direction in terms of communication as far as I can tell
from the comments it received.
>> One of the most important points here is about experimenting on users; and
>> it should be taken seriously. I also believe strongly that, as the author
>> suggests, we should treat editors as colleagues rather than customers.
>>
>This assumes that we aren't currently. I challenge the assumption. Can
>we get some evidence of that being the case? During the summer of
>research we worked directly with the community as colleagues. There's
>numerous other examples of this being the case.
I agree with MZ on this point. Furthermore it feels this problem has
gotten worse with time. (On the flip side, there is an even more
pronounced problem with the "community" treating us as service
providers instead of colleagues - so it goes both ways)
--
-bawolff
Hi,
i am planning to replace the current Planet Wikimedia software early next week.
For those who might not even know planet: What is planet? -->
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planet_Wikimedia
This is the current English planet as an example: -->
http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/
The original planet software we have used up until now is
unfortunately unmaintained and not available as a distribution package
nor was it puppetized.
First there was the original planet software (planetplanet.org), then
development stopped and then later it was continued as Planet 2.0.
Though there is also "Planet Venus", " "a radical refactoring of
Planet 2.0", and that is available as an Ubuntu package in universe :)
--> http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/ ,
http://packages.ubuntu.com/da/precise/planet-venus
---
quote from http://lwn.net/Articles/421348/:
".. However, Planet's development seems to have slowed considerably —
if not entirely stopped. The last updates in Jeff Waugh's repository
are dated early 2007.
Development seems to have carried on, somewhat quietly, with Planet
Venus. It's not reflected on the Planet site at all, but digging
through the mailing lists one finds development has continued under
the name Venus or Planet Venus. Venus is "a radical refactoring of
Planet 2.0," and development discussions continue on the old Planet
mailing lists."...
---
Planet Venus uses html5lib, XSLT and Django templates to parse the
feeds and create HTML. You can read more about it here:
http://planet.wmflabs.org/html/
And here is a nice .svg showing the architecture is uses to parse
feeds: http://planet.wmflabs.org/html/venus.svg
I had this running in labs for a while at http://planet.wmflabs.org/
and puppetized it.
You can find the puppet code in ./manifests/role/planet.pp and
./manifests/misc/planet.pp in the operations/puppet git repository.
And recent changes can be found under topic branch "planet".
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations/puppet.git;a=blob;f=mani…https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations/puppet.git;a=blob;f=mani…
Additionally, with the help of James Alexander (thanks!), we recently
went through a major cleanup of feed URLs, fixing lots of
redirected/moved feed URLs and removed broken feeds.
This can be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planet_Wikimedia#Requests_for_Update_or_Remo…
which also links to gerrit.
The new planet is already up here on a production host now:
http://zirconium.wikimedia.org/planet/
The English planet looks like this: http://zirconium.wikimedia.org/planet/en/
That index.html page will disappear, it is just there to link to the
different language planets for testing. So to get it live i will just
switch DNS to point to the zirconium host and make the index redirect
to the page on meta, as it does now.
The feeds are currently all updated at 00:00 UTC via cron.
If you see any issues with that, please speak up soon.
And have a nice weekend,
Daniel
--
Daniel Zahn <dzahn(a)wikimedia.org>
Operations Engineer
Ashish, thanks for the writeup, and for your work!
I see in
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals#Visual_E…
that integration of your work into VisualEditor is scheduled for
sometime in April-June 2013. What will you be doing to avoid code rot
between now and then, to ensure that the VE team (including you) can
perform that integration 8 months from now?
Thanks again.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
I realise that many contributors are WMF staff, and many WMF staff
work a relatively predictable 5-day week, but the "new changesets"
graph still seems a little spiky to my eyes.
Given the +- 10 changesets range, how much confidence should I be
placing in these numbers?
Thanks,
Harry
--
Harry Burt (User:Jarry1250)
Hi,
I was told yesterday that the mailman/pipermail archives were broken,
in that permalinks were no longer linking to the messages they used to
link to (therefore not being "permalinks" at all).
I know this happened at least once in the past, when the archives were
rebuilt. Retroactively fixing permalinks on-wiki and elsewhere is a
nightmare (particularly for old messages used to source early
Wikimedia history), and we're still finding tons of obsolete links
today. I'm hoping that whatever caused the permalinks to be changed
again can be swiftly reverted, so that we don't end up with another
huge pile of obsolete links.
Does anyone have any more information about what happened this time,
and if there's any chance links will be returned to their previous
state? I haven't been able to find a thread or recent bug about this
issue.
Thanks,
--
Guillaume Paumier
Hi.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_scripts
I created this page as I couldn't find many notes anywhere about some of the
global gadgets, modules, and templates that are on the horizon. I think some
early thinking about where to put these (or not put these) would go a long
way toward avoiding future messes.
MZMcBride
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:01:04 -0400
> From: Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Lua deployed to www.mediawiki.org
> Message-ID:
> <CADn73rPaG21iOvZQ3pewCyV86qS+=7=PJ_obGr7znCNP0+_9Gg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is the exact kind of attitude the op-ed in the Signpost is addressing.
>> When making major feature decision, such as redoing the entire templating
>> system, we cannot just say to editors "oh, if you want some input, go and
>> join our mailing list". That's just a passive-aggressive way of pushing
>> editors out of the conversation. How many purely editors, i.e., not
>> developers, are on this list actively participating in discussion?
>>
>
> Which communities? Engaging N editing communities just doesn't
> scale. Nor, to be perfectly honest, do I think its the appropriate
> venue. I expect people to join the places technical discussions take
> place (this list + mediawiki.org), just as I expect I should have to
> join a wiki's discussion forums to discuss content/community things.
> I'm perfectly willing to engage anyone on anything I work on, but I
> don't want to repeat myself in 20 different places.
>
> A long time ago, technical discussions happened on Meta. It was
> moved off of Meta since there's enough content to warrant its own
> wiki. Perhaps we can improve on getting notices out to people (hey,
> we're discussing FooBar, come talk with us [here]), but trying to
> shift the discussion to hundreds of individual wikis just doesn't work
> for me.
>
> -Chad
>
If people want to discuss to technical details of something they should join wikitech-l as you suggest. But I don't think others in this thread are asking about where the technical discussion of Lua took place. I think they are asking about the *other* discussion. The one we rarely seem to have which happens before there are labs, or code, or mock-ups. Something like:
. . .
Dear wikimedia-l,
Templates have been horrendously painful for a long time and it seems like I will finally have the time to focus addressing this in the coming year. I know the biggest problem is pages that fail load because timeouts and I hope to generally improve performance. The other things I anticipate address (fill in the blank) about editing and using templates. Also I plan on improve the some backend stuff that is off-topic for this list. The down-side is that to take advantage of these improvements templates will have be re-written in a new way that no one is familiar with. But the good news is I couldn't make harder to write templates I tried! It really shouldn't be that bad because the old template will still work just well/poorly as they did before. So not every template will have to be rewritten in by the new system. We can focus on just re-writing the ones that are most problematic, and if people want to use the new method to replace benign ones it wills their choice. The other con of going this route is that it is a complete rewrite and may take a year or two before deployment. But honestly I don't see a better option to fixing the page that are break like this one. LINK
So far I have started a page on MW. Some of it is pretty technical, but this link will take you where I have list the pros and cons of this solution and some feature it may include. LINK
Please pass this on to the people who work the most with templates in your communities. I am hoping that those most familiar with templates will add to this list in the next two weeks so I will have the best information to finalize my plans for this. I have already posted this the few places I could think of. So if you can think of a group that would like to know about this and don't already see this message there please inform them.
After the discussion at MW is done, I will email a follow to wikimedia-l and wikitech-l to let you know whether this something I will commit to take the lead on right now, and share my firm plans for development and the priorities for feature inclusion. Right now I am committed to nothing except resolving the broken page timeouts. After the follow-up email you will probably will not hear anything about this until there is something to test, or if I have enough testers, maybe not until we start planning deployment. But feel free to poke the talk-page on MW or email me for an update if you start to wonder how things are progressing.
. . .
Discussion about development need not be a technical discussion.
To your other point, I don't think one single instance of repeating yourself in 20 places about a project you plan on spending a year of your life developing is very onerous. This doesn't hold for updates, but It would be nice if there we were better at announcing the beginning of a commitment to a project very widely. That can only make the project more successful. And I think we may agree on this.
Birgitte SB
PS Forgive me if misrepresented what Lua means to do and how it was approached, in my fake email. I really don't understand exactly what Lua means to do nor its history and I took some wild guesses. I wanted to show the sort of the focus and level of detail of I would like in such a discussion, so the actual elements used were not important. If the my statements are at all accurate for Tim's approach with Lua, then I just made some lucky guesses. More likely I misrepresented where his actual thinking was when he began the project.
Greetings WLM testers,
Below you'll find the last beta of our Android app before final launch in
one week.
As before, make sure to have "Unknown sources" in Settings => Applications
turned on.
Uploads will go to test wiki so feel free to upload whatever you like.
Download:
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/android/WLM-v1.1beta3.apk
Feedback:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki
/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_mobile_application/Feedback
Please try the following:
* Browse by campaign and drill down to the desired region's monuments
* Sort the list by name and address
* Search with a search term
* Open a monument, click on "Get directions"
* Click on add a photo
* Login or create a Commons account
* Choose from gallery or take a photo
* Choose "Save for Later" on the Confirm Upload screen
* Go back to the opening screen
* Click on "Use my current location"
* Move around the map, open a cluster (a group of monuments close together)
* Click on a pin, open the monument
* Add a photo (login should be retained)
* Choose "Save for Later" on the Confirm Upload screen
* Click OK and choose or take another photo
* Go to Uploads and see the uploads saved for later
* Select some of the deferred uploads and upload them
Let us know what you think!
Known issues:
* The word Campaign will be changed to Country
* After deleting or uploading monuments saved for later, screen does not
refresh
Please forward this email as appropriate.
--
Phil Inje Chang
Product Manager, Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation
415-812-0854 m
415-882-7982 x 6810
