On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 12:04 PM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org wrote:
That was unfortunate - I've been ridiculed (by Max) for things I've said before as well, I feel your pain Ori.
That said however, I generally agree with this piece. I have more faith than the author seems to have that we are on the right track to doing better work in the future, but the points made are pretty valid. It's difficult, but very important, to observe mistakes made in the past as to not repeat those mistakes in the future.
A few of MZ's points make a lot of sense. It's sad, unfortunate and pretty unacceptable that we're been shipping features with no anti-vandalism or spam protection. Some of the newer interfaces do indeed look pretty childish. AFT, in it's current form really doesn't provide a lot of useful feedback.
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. The original design was flawed in that it used wiki pages and wiki page revisions for storage, which leads to it being unusable at scale. We should take this as an example of why we should avoid featuritis as much as possible and that we should consider scalability in initial designs to be a crucial feature.
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. 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.
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.
It is true that MZ has a tendency to be dramatic, but he's holding back a lot here to make a rational point, and I hope people don't write this off because of Max's propensity for being offensive and complaining.
I feel the Op-Ed takes a very negative approach at trying to solve what is effectively a communication problem. MZ's constructive points are very likely to be ignored because his negative and offensive approach makes it difficult to discuss his points without splitting the views into an us vs them debate.
- Ryan