2013/4/8 Risker risker.wp@gmail.com:
Eran raises a key point. On his project, there was a significant discussion prior to the deployment. Hewiki has voluntarily, as a community, decided to participate in the early development of a tool. This is a very good thing, and one that reflects well on the hewiki community.
Thanks for the compliment. A bit more detail: I heard about Wikidata quite early on (November 2011), because I follow mailing lists and conferences and I try to learn about new developments. As soon as I could, I asked Lydia if the hewiki can get it early. Lydia and Denny agreed, but, very interestingly, demanded to have detailed discussion on the wiki and get community. This was a very smart move on their behalf - I suppose that they learned from earlier bad communication blunders, so big kudos to them for that.
I tested Wikidata early and fixed a few tiny bugs, and when I thought that it's ready to show to the community, I announced it in the village pump. I was prepared to answer questions, and when I didn't know what to say, I asked Lydia, who stepped in and answered everything in detail. After the questions phase ended, there was ZERO objection to joining early testing of Wikidata. Zero objection to a change is a very rare thing for hewiki :)
Technical problems *were* uncovered after the deployment. Quite a lot of problems, actually. But the community was well prepared, and reported them in a mostly constructive way. There was general understanding that Wikidata migration will happen anyway, and that it's better to suffer through a few bugs than to just grumble.
English projects, particularly Wikipedia, do not have that same shared cultural, geographic or historical cohesion; as the lingua franca of more than a dozen countries, and the second language for thousands of other editors, even localized variations in usage can be a stumbling block. Add into that the fact that English Wikipedia has such a large editing community, and that there is no effective centralized communication process, and the ability of the community to develop a consensus opinion on any major topic is exponentially more difficult than on many other projects.
I find SiteNotice and the notification area above the Watchlist very simple and effective communication tools. The latter is used now for the PageProtector RFC now, for example.
Now that I think of it, I don't recall that it was used for announcements about Wikidata (although I might be wrong). It probably should have. On the other hand, it might have created stop energy without very good preparation.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore