Brion Vibber wrote: this morning.

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: 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

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

Gerard Meijssen wrote: 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: 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

I think he means that people could voulenteer to pay for developments of certain things.

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: 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

Ray Saintonge wrote: 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. 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.

Timwi wrote: 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.

Anthere: 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

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_sta… -- Zigger