MZMcBride,
The way that you have addressed Deb here is very unconstructive and
inappropriate. Your choice of language (e.g. "hijacked", "wrongfully
seized") is not conducive to a good working environment. Constructive
feedback is welcomed, but much of what you said here was not that. If you
are unable to be more constructive moving forward, my team will not respond
to your comments.
Regarding the descriptive text, the current situation on sister portals and
in other places was evaluated beforehand, which included looking at a relevant
template on Meta-Wiki
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Main_Page/Sisterprojects/en>. As
you mentioned, the text there isn't great and many of the descriptions used
in different places are incredibly inconsistent with each other; therefore,
there was no golden standard to use. I agree that the descriptive text on
wikipedia.org for the sister projects could be changed further to improve
its consistency. The team will look into that.
Regarding the move of the portal to a git-based system, as I explained in
great detail in my 18 comments on T110070
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110070>, this move was done in
partnership with Mxn, the primary maintainer of the portal in its previous
system. Mxn and I spoke in person about the portal at Wikimania 2015, which
was what really kicked this project off; I also mentioned that in my very
comment <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110070#1568488> on that
T110070. I was also very clear in my comments on the task
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110070#1653320> that we were
specifically trying to improve only
wikipedia.org to keep our work
manageable and maintain cost effectiveness for our efforts.
There are some things that Discovery has done really well at since (and
because of) the migration, such as improving the performance of the page by
minifying <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minification_(programming)> the
JavaScript used on the page, and significantly increasing the clickthrough
rate
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Initial_Assessment_of_New_Wikipedia_Portal%27s_Search_Box_Deployment.pdf>
on the portal by improving the user experience of the box. There are some
things that we could've done better, like keeping the statistics on the
portal up-to-date. As mentioned above, constructive feedback is welcomed.
Dan
On 20 May 2016 at 16:07, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Deborah Tankersley wrote:
The Discovery Team recently added descriptive text
to the
Wikipedia.org
page footer in order to give visitors a better idea of what the sister
wiki projects are really all about. Check it out at
www.wikipedia.org
[...]
Hi Deb,
The descriptive texts don't seem great. Some are inconsistent and at least
one is potentially misleading. Some notes:
* "Free Dictionary" instead of "Free dictionary" for Wiktionary.
* Starting with "Free" for eight of the projects, but then using a
different pattern for the others (e.g., "The free library").
* Meta-Wiki is "Our community site"? Huh? What does that suggest about the
other projects? Are they not community sites?
* The descriptive texts are only available in English.
The Wikimedia (Foundation) logo is bizarrely in black and white. Why?
It's frustrating and annoying that your happy team hijacked this portal,
and only this portal, from the Meta-Wiki community that maintained it for
many years. Your actions have resulted in other portals such as
www.wiktionary.org falling out of sync with
www.wikipedia.org. I wonder
how much community involvement and collaboration there is now that your
team has wrongfully seized ownership of this page.
MZMcBride
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Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation