Isarra Yos <zhorishna@...> writes:
Aye, we do need to move on. But there are also lessons in what has lingered all this time - we need to look at it and understand why in order to properly address it and serve the underlying needs. This is why we iterate on what's there, and don't only make drastically new things.
Do we actually know the lessons? Are they listed anywhere? Are they valid anymore? Do modern web practices cover them?
It's great to iterate on things when they are relatively modern. It's folly to do so when you're almost a decade behind the industry standard. The argument itself is odd because Vector has not been iterating steadily towards modern practices. It's been stagnant for years.
We are not most organisations; where many answer to external stakeholders, and the consumers are simply the product, that is not so here. Wikimedia doesn't just answer to its communities, it IS the communities - all of them, the various projects, the WMF, GLAM, even dark corners of Commons and random people doing meetups for editathons - and its purpose is not profit, but education via a tenable, usable end result of efforts from all of them.
The community you're talking about is the editor community, which is a tiny fraction of the overall community, but attempts to speak with authority over the entirety of it. The vocal portion of the editor community that speaks with this authority is even a minor fraction of the editor community. We're talking about .001% of the entire community that holds the entire movement hostage (5167 people voted in the last election, and there's 430 million monthly active readers).
The reader community is massive and has no voice, except their complaints across the internet. The WMF can and should be the voice for the reader community.
Isn't a motto of the movement "Be bold"? What happened to that? Maybe we should change things to "Be careful; it's scary to change".
Neither of these work without the other. Being bold, you must be careful, or it will blow up in your face. Being careful gets you nowhere without also being bold.
The status quo is that change never happens because people are too scared to change. There's no boldness here. There's hardly even basic assertiveness.
"The community is scared of change" seems to be a common excuse from those too scared to work with communities outside of their own.
Or an argument of those who think it's not in the readers' best interest to have editors with little to no knowledge of software engineering or UX design dictating the engineering and design of reader features.
And many communities do propose change - some changes are good, some not so good, some need more resources to ever actually work. Just shoving things down people's throats, however, does not work. Consider the multimedia viewer, which needed an overhaul for copyrights alone and is still problematic to date. Consider visual editor when it was first released; even now, when it is so much more powerful, it isn't even available by default on many major wikis. Consider the typography refresh, which has been piecemeally reverted over the course of months. Then look at extensions like massmessage, abusefilter, timedmediahandler, apisandbox, globalcssjs, and others which considered the use cases and worked with the end users to make a sensible product with little reason to reject it. These may be smaller changes, or less reader-facing, but the way they were developed, never even mind how they were introduced, is particularly important. People were involved, problems were considered.
If you want to know what the "community" is afraid of, it's not change. It's things being developed entirely without them even in mind, getting shoved at them forcefully, and breaking what workflows they have. Unlike for some organisations, these are not simply users we profit off of while they amuse themselves, but volunteers donating their time, effort, and content, and they are the ones you should be concerning yourself with always. Not the readers, them.
We make the content work for the readers so that the volunteers' efforts are not in vain.
I've also volunteered my time for the past 10 years, but as an engineer. I care about Wikimedia more as a reader than as an editor and my experience as a reader is not great and the editor community is the primary reason for this. The WMF's hesitation to make change is heavily based on the pitchforks and torches lit by this community.
We should carefully continue along the path of iterating on Vector. We
should
gradually converge it's styling and implementation with that of OOjs UI. We should continue improving usability and accessibility on a
variety of
form factors. We should perform research and base changes on the
findings it
produces. This will enable us to move forward with minimal cost, and far less drama.
It's sad that Wikimedia has given up on users.
Who has given up? The fact that we are even having this conversation seems pretty clear evidence that we haven't just yet.
There's not really a conversation. The UX lead is saying "Winter is dead, let's continue with the iterations on Vector", though there's no real iteration going on. The editor community is opposed to any change that doesn't completely agree with them, where the "them" is around 5,000 people who also can't agree with each other and aren't qualified to be making the decisions to begin with.
- Ryan Lane