I don't know if restricting the wishlist only for other projects is so
terrible. Non-Wikipedia projects have complained for years that they are
not getting enough attention, so perhaps giving them extra love at the
expense of Wikipedia makes sense.
I would look at a wider problem, though. Over the years that the community
wishlist vote has been working, a lot of excellent projects were completed
by the Community Tech team: global preferences, the pageviews tool,
TemplateWizard, wiki syntax highlighting, edit summary improvements, and
many more. However, several projects that received a very large number of
votes were declined, not because they were undesirable but because they
were too big for this team, which by its nature is oriented at small,
timeboxed projects. That, by itself, is understandable.
The real trouble is that even though there is demand for these things
(given the vote results), and even though no-one seems to think that the
ideas are invalid or undesirable, they ended up not being done. Some
notable examples:
* Cross-wiki watchlist (#4 in 2015, declined:
)
* Global gadgets (#1 in 2016; I couldn't find the reason for declining)
* Global templates (#3 in 2015; marked as "in development by Parsing team",
but not actually done)
All of these things are still very much in demand. All of them happen to be
particularly beneficial also to non-Wikipedia projects, but if they will be
proposed for this year's wishlist vote and get a lot of votes, will they
again be declined because they are too big for the Community Tech team or
will they be escalated to another team (or teams) that can execute them?
If there is no commitment to such escalation from higher management, we'll
stay stuck in a ridiculous situation in which the most needed projects are
also those that cannot be carried out.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
בתאריך שבת, 5 באוק׳ 2019 ב-2:44 מאת Yuri Astrakhan <
yuriastrakhan@gmail.com>:
Ilana, restricting wishlist to non-Wikipedia this year
is a very sad news.
For many years, wishlist survey was the best way for the community to talk
back to the foundation, and to try to influence its direction. WMF mostly
ignored these wishes, yet it was still a place to express, discuss,
aggregate and vote on what community needed. Big thank-you is due to the
tiny community tech team that tackled the top 10 items, but that's just ~3%
of the foundation's employees.
WMF has been steadily separating itself from the community and loosing
credibility as a guiding force. Take a look at the last election -- almost
every candidate has said "no" to the question if WMF is capable of
deciding/delivering on the direction [1]. In **every** single conversation
I had with the community members, people expressed doubts with the movement
strategy project, in some cases even treating it as a joke.
This is a huge problem, and restricting wishlist kills the last effective
feedback mechanism community had. Now WMF is fully in control of itself,
with nearly no checks & balances from the people who created it.
I still believe that if WMF makes it a priority to align most of its
quarterly/yearly goals with the community wishlist (not just top 10
positions), we could return to the effective community-governance.
Otherwise WMF is risking to mirror Red Cross Haiti story [2] -- hundreds of
millions of $$ donated, and very few buildings actually built.
With great respect to all the people who made Wikis what they are today,
--[[User:Yurik]]
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2019/Questio…
?
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross#Disaster_preparedness_and_…
On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 5:18 PM Ilana Fried <ifried(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello, everyone!
My name is Ilana, and I'm the product manager for the Community Tech
team.
We’re excited to share an update on the Community
Tech 2020 Wishlist
Survey
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020>. This
will
be our fifth annual Community Wishlist Survey, and for this year, we’ve
decided to take a different approach. In the past, we've invited people
to
write proposals for any features or fixes that
they'd like to see, and
the
Community Tech team has addressed the top ten
wishes with the most
support
votes. This year, we're just going to focus
on the *non-Wikipedia content
projects* (i.e. Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource,
Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews), and we're
only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. This is a big
departure from the typical process. In the following year (2021), we’ll
probably return to the traditional structure.
So, why this change? We’ve been following the same format for years —
and,
generally, it has lots of benefits. We build
great tools, provide useful
improvements, and have an impact on diverse communities. However, the
nature of the format tends to prioritize the largest project (Wikipedia).
This makes it harder to serve smaller projects, and many of their wishes
never make it onto the wishlist. As a community-focused team, we want to
support *all* projects. Thus, for 2020, we want to shine a light on
non-Wikipedia projects.
Furthermore, we’ll be accepting five wishes. Over the years, we’ve taken
on
larger wishes (like Global Preferences
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Global_preferences> or
Who
Wrote That
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Who_Wrote_That_tool>),
which are awesome projects. At the same time, they tend to be lengthy
endeavors, requiring extra time for research and development. When we
looked at the 2019 wishlist, there were still many unresolved wishes.
Meanwhile, we wanted to make room for the new 2020 wishes. For this
reason,
we’ve decided to take on a shortened list, so we
can address as many
wishes
(new and remaining 2019 wishes
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Results
)
as possible.
Overall, we look forward to this year’s survey. We worked with lots of
folks (engineering, product management, and others) to think about how we
could support underserved projects, all while preserving the dynamic and
open nature of the wishlist. *Please let us know your thoughts
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020>*
related
to this change. In addition, we’ll begin thinking about the guidelines
for
this new process, so *we want your feedback
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020>*
(on
what sorts of processes/rules we may want to
consider). Thank you, and
we’re very curious to see the wishes in November!
Thanks,
Ilana Fried
Product Manager, Community Tech
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech>
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