On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 7:59 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
It's disturbing that even at the same time as the engineering and operations departments are working so hard to professionalize their work, to bring themselves up to industry standards, to properly staff themselves with people who understand not just the technical side, but also the content side - that there remains this cowboy attitude toward applying poorly developed software onto huge sites knowing full well that the software create significant community disruption. This isn't a little backwater website anymore, and it should never be the subject of a major test without the active engagement of those who are going to be the test subjects.
Wiki design 101 is that nobody gets sent to another page/website/etc to edit content on the Wikipedia. (Even clicking on an image that is held on Commons takes people to a Wikipedia page for the image, and then gives them the choice to go to Commons.) This software is not ready for deployment; everyone here knows it. This is now just pride taking the place of common sense. (And no, David, it's not bikeshedding.)
Figure out why the content itself is being affected, instead of creating a new namespace that will hold all this data: wikidata, authority control data, H-cards, V-cards, and all the other miscellaneous stuff that has been applied to articles.
This is not a technical problem to be solved. It is at its core a philosophical matter to be grappled with, project by project.
Learn some lessons from the folks down the hall in Fundraising - who have figured out how to fully fund all of these projects with the minimal amount of disruption to the content and the editorial process. Figure out how to do that, and you'll have a winner.
I understand you're upset but please also understand the other side. We've put a lot of work into making it possible for each Wikipedia to decide how they want to make use of the data for example. The existing system is built to exactly not disrupt anything that exists until the local community decides to make changes. I understand that making this decision is difficult in a large project as enwp but it's not like we're replacing infoboxes that exist automatically for example. We've from the beginning of the project started with letting people use early stages of the project exactly because we needed the feedback to shape the tool in a way that will serve Wikipedia - and we'd like this at each step of the way because otherwise we're bound to build something that is in one form or another not useful for you. We've always started with test systems and smaller Wikipedias (Go them!) but that only goes so far unfortunately.
Cheers Lydia
-- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata
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