Why did you remove quantity voting system in Bugzilla ? It did not work ?
ant
Tim reconfigured it to have one vote per bug and a very large pool of votes ( given our # of bugs ) per user, each user now has one vote per bug.
I like it.
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
Tim reconfigured it to have one vote per bug and a very large pool of votes ( given our # of bugs ) per user, each user now has one vote per bug.
I like it.
Now you can actually tell which bugs are more wanted than other bugs. Some people were voting 1, some 100, some 400, some 700. When you add them all together you get a number which has not much relation to anything. There were 3 developers present on IRC, all were in favour. Bugzilla sent an email to everyone who had voted telling them that their votes had been declared invalid, bless it.
While I was at it I gave Ævar admin access on Bugzilla, I'm sure he'll have fun tweaking categories.
-- Tim Starling
On 6/11/05, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
Tim reconfigured it to have one vote per bug and a very large pool of votes ( given our # of bugs ) per user, each user now has one vote per bug.
I like it.
Now you can actually tell which bugs are more wanted than other bugs. Some people were voting 1, some 100, some 400, some 700. When you add them all together you get a number which has not much relation to anything. There were 3 developers present on IRC, all were in favour. Bugzilla sent an email to everyone who had voted telling them that their votes had been declared invalid, bless it.
I like this as well. It makes it a lot easier to figure out at a glance how many people want a certain feature/bug.
Hoi, I have mixed feelings with this new effort to give a new lease of life to the bugzilla votes. Previously the votes on bugs were dismissed with a "we do what we want because we are volunteers". It is encouraging that the votes are looked at again, but has something really changed, the developers are still volunteers and they can as easily dismiss the votes as they have done in the past. It makes no difference who does the asking, there are bugs where Jimbo, Anthere and Angela all asked for a particular bug to be fixed.. to no avail.. And indeed why would such a request be honoured; the developers are volunteers ..
In the past you had many votes to give away but they were a finite resource. When a bug was given a massive amount of votes by one person it meant that the request was really important. Now a person can give only one vote for one bug. The developer can still say "I am a volunteer and I will do bug X in stead".
To conclude, it makes little difference how the votes are looked at because there is only one vote that is essential. It is the developer saying: "Yes, that is something I can do, let's give it a go". Thanks, GerardM
On 6/11/05, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, I have mixed feelings with this new effort to give a new lease of life to the bugzilla votes. Previously the votes on bugs were dismissed with a "we do what we want because we are volunteers". It is encouraging that the votes are looked at again, but has something really changed, the developers are still volunteers and they can as easily dismiss the votes as they have done in the past. It makes no difference who does the asking, there are bugs where Jimbo, Anthere and Angela all asked for a particular bug to be fixed.. to no avail.. And indeed why would such a request be honoured; the developers are volunteers ..
Well votes will always be dismissed to a certain degree for the reasons you cited, however with the previous system when I did look at it I felt that, like Tim said (paraphrased) I didn't get a number with much relation to anything. Whereas now I can see that X people found bug Y important enough to vote for it, which for me says alot more than a bug with 2000 votes which could be the result of two people voting for it with their maximum of 1000 votes or 20 people voting with 100 votes.
In the past you had many votes to give away but they were a finite resource. When a bug was given a massive amount of votes by one person it meant that the request was really important. Now a person can give only one vote for one bug. The developer can still say "I am a volunteer and I will do bug X in stead".
Of course, and that will never ever change as long as you have volunteers, no matter good your vote system you have, note however that some of us(1) do like helping people out and at least take these votes in as a factor when deciding what to work on.
1. Not meant as some lame attack on anyone else working on develoment.
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
In the past you had many votes to give away but they were a finite resource. When a bug was given a massive amount of votes by one person it meant that the request was really important.
Maybe that's what it meant to you, but what did it mean to the 170 out of 320 voters who have only voted for one bug? And what did it mean to the many people who voted with a value of 1, without ever giving consideration to multiple votes?
As for the rest of your post, I've always done my best to do the right thing by Wikipedia and its users, I know you're annoyed that that's a "p" in the middle of the word instead of an "m". You're not going to make me feel guilty by pointing out that the group of users to whom I freely give my time and assistance doesn't include you. I'm interested in vote tallies to the extent that they give an indication of the needs of Wikipedians.
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
In the past you had many votes to give away but they were a finite resource. When a bug was given a massive amount of votes by one person it meant that the request was really important.
Maybe that's what it meant to you, but what did it mean to the 170 out of 320 voters who have only voted for one bug? And what did it mean to the many people who voted with a value of 1, without ever giving consideration to multiple votes?
As for the rest of your post, I've always done my best to do the right thing by Wikipedia and its users, I know you're annoyed that that's a "p" in the middle of the word instead of an "m". You're not going to make me feel guilty by pointing out that the group of users to whom I freely give my time and assistance doesn't include you. I'm interested in vote tallies to the extent that they give an indication of the needs of Wikipedians.
-- Tim Starling
Hoi, Tim, please do not misunderstand. The voting system has a limited effect. When I need something programmed, I know that I do not need to ask you if it does not apply to the "p". I am not annoyed about that there are more fish in the sea and, I have my own way of getting what is needed. When a bug is voted upon, and it gets many votes, it is voted upon by Wikimedians, many people are not confined to just one project. It is your choise to work only on Wikipedia issues. Your exclusiveness makes it less relevant to ask you for an opinion when it is not strictly Wikipedia. That is a loss, because I rate you as a capable and competent person.
I would and will be annoyed when work done for other projects is frustrated or sabotaged because it is not Wikipedia related. That is something that has not happened yet as far as I am aware. It is sad that you exclude me from people you would give assistance; I do spend time and effort on wikipedia. If it means that I have to ask others to put forward my proposals re Wikipedia let me know. I had something to do with the Kennisnet servers, I do not think that you would not spend time on these when there is a need just because I had some involvement there.. Please Tim, judge my requests on their merits and if you do not want to personally honour a specific request do so in silence, there is no need to be nasty about it.
By the way, for your amusement, a Dutch saying; "er de p in hebben" "to have the p in it" means that you are really annoyed... so it is funny that you want to find a "p" in it. :)
Thanks, GerardM
Tim Starling wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
In the past you had many votes to give away but they were a finite resource. When a bug was given a massive amount of votes by one person it meant that the request was really important.
Maybe that's what it meant to you, but what did it mean to the 170 out of 320 voters who have only voted for one bug? And what did it mean to the many people who voted with a value of 1, without ever giving consideration to multiple votes?
As for the rest of your post, I've always done my best to do the right thing by Wikipedia and its users, I know you're annoyed that that's a "p" in the middle of the word instead of an "m". You're not going to make me feel guilty by pointing out that the group of users to whom I freely give my time and assistance doesn't include you. I'm interested in vote tallies to the extent that they give an indication of the needs of Wikipedians.
If many people feel as strongly as you, then perhaps there is scope for a wiki "bounties" page where people can offer to pay for development? Seems that hard physical "beer tokens" are a better form of vote than electronic ones anyway...
Ed
Ed W wrote:
If many people feel as strongly as you, then perhaps there is scope for a wiki "bounties" page where people can offer to pay for development? Seems that hard physical "beer tokens" are a better form of vote than electronic ones anyway...
So if Wikipedians aren't interested in working on the various other projects of the foundation, you think we should just use money donated by Wikipedia readers to pay for them instead?
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
Ed W wrote:
If many people feel as strongly as you, then perhaps there is scope for a wiki "bounties" page where people can offer to pay for development? Seems that hard physical "beer tokens" are a better form of vote than electronic ones anyway...
So if Wikipedians aren't interested in working on the various other projects of the foundation, you think we should just use money donated by Wikipedia readers to pay for them instead?
-- Tim Starling
Hoi, When developers aren't interested in working on functionality for the various projects of the foundation, we should find developers that are. The motivation why a programmer does what he does is no issue. As much as it is in your right to do what you do, it should be acceptable when someone writes code for money when this gets us the functionality that is lacking.
Money can be donated for many reasons. Money can come from many sources. Kennisnet pays for the Wikidata development and Ultimate Wiktionary as its first project. It is morally wrong to deny the people who donate money to the Wikimedia Foundation the right to earmark money for projects that they want to donate money to. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Donations:Putting_your_money_where_your_mouth... describes a scheme that explains how this can be done.
It is up to the board to decide how and where we spend money. We know that in Togo and Ossetia content is payed for. This is one way of creating content where we are weak. Suggestions have been made of creating "Wikimedia scholarships" where students work for the WMF to write content. The benefit for the student would be that he would need to work only 20 hours a week in stead of 30 hours. The bottom line is that spending money on these things is one way of achieving our objectives. We can get a lot of money from the public if we are clever and thrifty in the way we spend this money.
When money should only be used for hardware, we do not need to ask for money as there are plenty of organisations that are willing to donate hosting and bandwith to the WMF. So get the KNAMS "vandale" server to host a database because this is one way of saving us a lot of money because it will allow us to use all this free hosting.
Thanks, GerardM
This comes from a thread on wikitech-l, I'm cross-posting it to wikipedia-l. Please reply on one list only.
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, When developers aren't interested in working on functionality for the various projects of the foundation, we should find developers that are.
Who is "we"? I joined Wikipedia well before the Foundation was formed, I've watched it develop. I can't help but feel that myself and those who share my views are underrepresented. I've argued for focus but I've been ignored. Wikipedia has grown but has barely matured, the date for "Wikipedia 1.0" keeps being pushed back with virtually no progress made. Instead, any enthusiastic newcomer with an idea for a word we can prepend "wiki" to is greeted with open arms, especially if they come bearing money.
It would be all very well if Wikipedia could manage itself, but I don't think it can, I think it lacks strong leadership. I don't think it's any surprise that the German Wikipedia, with enthusiastic leadership largely independent of the Foundation, has had more success with distribution and quality control than the English Wikipedia.
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
This comes from a thread on wikitech-l, I'm cross-posting it to wikipedia-l. Please reply on one list only.
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, When developers aren't interested in working on functionality for the various projects of the foundation, we should find developers that are.
Who is "we"? I joined Wikipedia well before the Foundation was formed, I've watched it develop. I can't help but feel that myself and those who share my views are underrepresented. I've argued for focus but I've been ignored. Wikipedia has grown but has barely matured, the date for "Wikipedia 1.0" keeps being pushed back with virtually no progress made. Instead, any enthusiastic newcomer with an idea for a word we can prepend "wiki" to is greeted with open arms, especially if they come bearing money.
I can't comment on the money aspect, but apart from that there is much to what you say. I find Gerard's comment somewhat increditible, and totally failing to understand people. Imagine firing all the developers who do not jump to bring out someone's pet project! :-D I wonder what his next trick would be. I don't have the zeal for a lot of gadgety features, I very much prefer a solid system that works with a high degree of predictability. I see Gerard trumpeting his Ultimate Wiktionary, yet he disclaims ability to programme this project. I agree with you about the 1.0 but I see the problems there as being more social than technical. ... and that just brings us back to the question of leadership.
It would be all very well if Wikipedia could manage itself, but I don't think it can, I think it lacks strong leadership. I don't think it's any surprise that the German Wikipedia, with enthusiastic leadership largely independent of the Foundation, has had more success with distribution and quality control than the English Wikipedia.
The projects long ago passed the point where one person could maintain leadership over everything. Some of the democracy that I've seen around has only served to strengthen my faith in dictatorship. Sometimes leadership a question of decisiveness when the need to take action becomes stronger than being right or wrong. We are attractive to those who on a mass scale would recreate their ersatz world of diletantes and poetasters with a historical perspective as deep as the latest video game. Policy discussions go around in circles with no-one knowing how, or having the courage to escape from the circle.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
This comes from a thread on wikitech-l, I'm cross-posting it to wikipedia-l. Please reply on one list only.
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, When developers aren't interested in working on functionality for the various projects of the foundation, we should find developers that are.
Who is "we"? I joined Wikipedia well before the Foundation was formed, I've watched it develop. I can't help but feel that myself and those who share my views are underrepresented. I've argued for focus but I've been ignored. Wikipedia has grown but has barely matured, the date for "Wikipedia 1.0" keeps being pushed back with virtually no progress made. Instead, any enthusiastic newcomer with an idea for a word we can prepend "wiki" to is greeted with open arms, especially if they come bearing money.
I can't comment on the money aspect, but apart from that there is much to what you say. I find Gerard's comment somewhat increditible, and totally failing to understand people. Imagine firing all the developers who do not jump to bring out someone's pet project! :-D I wonder what his next trick would be. I don't have the zeal for a lot of gadgety features, I very much prefer a solid system that works with a high degree of predictability. I see Gerard trumpeting his Ultimate Wiktionary, yet he disclaims ability to programme this project. I agree with you about the 1.0 but I see the problems there as being more social than technical. ... and that just brings us back to the question of leadership.
Who gives you the impression that programmers are to be fired ? What gives you this idea ? The idea is to find programmers that are willing to develop the functionality that is asked for. So if anything I am looking for more developers. As to my programming skills, I have quite a bit of experience but on different platforms. I have been spending my time on other things than learning new platforms and programming languages. A more relevant question on programming; would you prefer me to program Ultimate Wiktionary or would you prefer Erik Moeller ? I understand the complexity involved so I am happy to have a more able person do the programming.
It would be all very well if Wikipedia could manage itself, but I don't think it can, I think it lacks strong leadership. I don't think it's any surprise that the German Wikipedia, with enthusiastic leadership largely independent of the Foundation, has had more success with distribution and quality control than the English Wikipedia.
The projects long ago passed the point where one person could maintain leadership over everything. Some of the democracy that I've seen around has only served to strengthen my faith in dictatorship. Sometimes leadership a question of decisiveness when the need to take action becomes stronger than being right or wrong. We are attractive to those who on a mass scale would recreate their ersatz world of diletantes and poetasters with a historical perspective as deep as the latest video game. Policy discussions go around in circles with no-one knowing how, or having the courage to escape from the circle.
Ec
If you want to break out of endless talk, stop talking and do something. It is possible to get many things done. It is just a matter of doing them. What you have to try to do is to explain what you are doing. The process of Ultimate Wiktionary is a lengthy one, it will have taken a year to go from initial concept to realisation. It is an experiment so it will at first be running next to the existing wiktionaries. The problems will proppably be solved and when it has proven itself, wiktionaries will die off. It it does not they will not. So yes, you may accuse me of decisiveness because I have a dream and I work on making it a reality. When people do not understand what I am working on, I am happy to explain. When you call for dictatorship, you mean that you want things your way. I urge you to create your way and make plain why your way is best. You do this by proving your point practically not by rubbishing other people's efforts.
Thanks, GerardM
PS There are plenty of other tricks. I do publish about them, they are not a secret.
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
The developer can still say "I am a volunteer and I will do bug X in stead".
Is there a page on MediaZilla that lists bugs sorted by the number of votes? If that was made more prominent, I'm pretty sure that highly-voted-for bugs will receive more attention.
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
Is there a page on MediaZilla that lists bugs sorted by the number of votes? If that was made more prominent, I'm pretty sure that highly-voted-for bugs will receive more attention.
You can go to Advanced Search, and enter "1" (or greater) in "Only bugs with at least: [ ] votes" text box towards the lower left of the page. Then the search results will have a sortable vote column.
Dori a écrit:
On 6/11/05, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
Tim reconfigured it to have one vote per bug and a very large pool of votes ( given our # of bugs ) per user, each user now has one vote per bug.
I like it.
Now you can actually tell which bugs are more wanted than other bugs. Some people were voting 1, some 100, some 400, some 700. When you add them all together you get a number which has not much relation to anything. There were 3 developers present on IRC, all were in favour. Bugzilla sent an email to everyone who had voted telling them that their votes had been declared invalid, bless it.
I like this as well. It makes it a lot easier to figure out at a glance how many people want a certain feature/bug.
Well, voting methods always have benefits or drawbacks.
Now, you can measure how many people really support a feature. But no more.
Previously, you could mostly measure how much a feature was important to those who voted for it. But you could also go see details and see how many people really wanted it.
In a sense, results are easier to read now for you as they have only one interpretation (number of supporters), while before they had two interpretations (number of supporters AND degree of support). They are easier, but far less informative. Perhaps a middle solution might have been to allow between 1 to 3 points for each feature.
This said, as several mentionned here, it does not really matter actually, as developers are volunteers and work on features they feel like working on.
Recently, a journalist reminded me about wikimoney and asked me why I think it failed. Well, most of us needs at the same time to work on something that is fun for them and something useful for others. Possibly first driven force is more important than second ;-)
Ant
Anthere:
In a sense, results are easier to read now for you as they have only one interpretation (number of supporters), while before they had two interpretations (number of supporters AND degree of support).
It's a very bad idea to use a rating system with a large scale (e.g. from 1 to 1000), as everyone will use it differently and the average becomes meaningless (as does the individual vote unless you look at that person's entire voting record). The other problem was that, due to the terminology "vote", many people were likely to assume that they only had a single vote.
A 1-5 rating system (without the term "vote") would probably be optimal, but the current solution is a big improvement to make the statistics more meaningful, which will be useful to the Research Team.
Best,
Erik
Erik Moeller (erik_moeller@gmx.de) [050613 01:21]:
It's a very bad idea to use a rating system with a large scale (e.g. from 1 to 1000), as everyone will use it differently and the average becomes meaningless (as does the individual vote unless you look at that person's entire voting record). The other problem was that, due to the terminology "vote", many people were likely to assume that they only had a single vote. A 1-5 rating system (without the term "vote") would probably be optimal, but the current solution is a big improvement to make the statistics more meaningful, which will be useful to the Research Team.
This was the thinking behind a 1-4 scale for article ratings - yes/no is too binary for a lot of things, but 1-10 is too broad.
For Bugzilla votes, one vote or none is probably fine ... particularly if that's what the devs who would be paying attention to them want to measure. I'd call that an overwhelmingly convincing reason to go with the current system ;-)
By the way: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/page.cgi?id=voting.html still says "Indicate how many votes you want to give this bug. This page also displays how many votes you've given to other bugs, so you may rebalance your votes as necessary." - this should probably be changed if the system's changed.
(/me goes votes for bug 550 - any bug I can remember the number of probably deserves a vote)
- d.
I didn't like it at first, as I can't prioritise my votes, and the previous wide range meant that developers might have been more likely to look beyond the raw number. But after having looked at the result of (1), I'm intrigued by what is going to happen next, if people are actually going to use these. And will we see the rise of evangelists, ginger groups, and sock-puppets? Mmmm, politics ...
Some highlights:
The only non-enhancement in the top ten requires MySQL 4.1. Getting 1.5 out the door gets two votes (bumped to three votes, which may seem high for a tracking bug but the PostgreSQL tracker beat it). The top four are all to do with integration of the Wikimedia wikis. Documentation is #11.
The maximum number of votes has not changed, but 1000 per product seems sufficient.
(1) http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&bug_stat...
-- Zigger
On 6/11/05, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
Tim reconfigured it to have one vote per bug and a very large pool of votes ( given our # of bugs ) per user, each user now has one vote per bug.
I like it.
Now you can actually tell which bugs are more wanted than other bugs. Some people were voting 1, some 100, some 400, some 700. When you add them all together you get a number which has not much relation to anything. There were 3 developers present on IRC, all were in favour. Bugzilla sent an email to everyone who had voted telling them that their votes had been declared invalid, bless it.
While I was at it I gave Ævar admin access on Bugzilla, I'm sure he'll have fun tweaking categories.
I'm having the time of my life >;)
But while we're at it here's a neat vote-related link:
* http://tinyurl.com/7svp9 Bugs with more than 3 votes ordered by votes
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