On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 12:13 PM bawolff <bawolff+wn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I actually meant a different type of maintenance.
Maintaining the encyclopedia (and other wiki projects) is of course an
activity that needs software support.
But software is also something that needs maintenance. Technology,
standards, circumstances change over time. Software left alone will
"bitrot" over time. A long term technical strategy to do anything needs to
account for that, plan for that. One off feature development does not.
Democratically directed one-off feature development accounts for that even
less.
I understand. I was intending to comment on maintenance activities in
general, whether that be maintenance of a city's water system, maintenance
of the text of encyclopedia articles, or maintenance of software. My train
of thought proceeded into a somewhat detailed commentary detail regarding
maintenance of non-software Wikimedia elements. I think that the tendency
to under-resource maintenance in favor of novelties is similar in many
domains of human activity, but I also think that humans collectively are
not so unwise that we will prefer novelties over maintenance every time
that there is a referendum on whether to maintain an existing service or to
create something new. {{Citation needed}}
I think that multiple good points have been raised in this thread regarding
the subjects of technical and human systems for detecting and intervening
against possible unflagged bots. I am wondering what a good way would be to
get a WMF product manager or someone similar to dedicate time to this
topic. My preference remains that one or more WMF people, or teams, add
this to their list of topics to address in a future quarter such as Q1 of
the WMF 2019-2020 fiscal year. I don't know how the WMF Community Tech team
plans for maintenance of features after the features are initially built,
debugged, and deployed, and based on the current state of this discussion I
don't currently have a strong opinion regarding whether Community Tech or a
different team would be best suited to work on the topic of unflagged bots.
I also don't know how WMF makes decisions about what goals are for teams
other than Community Tech for future quarters, but that information could
be helpful to have for this conversation.
Thanks,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )