I strongly agree with what Isarra wrote. She's wise.
Ryan Lane wrote:
Isarra Yos 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?
We need to do better about this.
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.
And this.
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.
This is bullshit. "Decisions are made by those who show up." If you want to be part of the discussion, all you have to do is participate in good faith. That's how I'm involved, that's how you're involved, that's how Isarra and Nemo and Risker and nearly everyone else is involved. Pro-tip: that's not only how Wikipedia works, that's how life works too.
Isn't a motto of the movement "Be bold"? What happened to that?
Have you read the English Wikipedia page lately? It's a nightmare. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
I keep meaning to cut it back at some point. The various namespace restrictions are such silliness. In any case, for a long time it's been "be bold, but not reckless." A big top-down redesign (not that you're directly proposing such, I'm speaking generally) would be reckless.
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.
Yeah, the community has put in place some protections to ensure that it doesn't get trampled by a bunch of product managers sitting in San Francisco. I won't apologize for that, it's a feature, not a flaw.
"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.
Encyclopedias are only supposed to be written by experts, too, right? :-) We're getting into trope territory here.
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.
What would you like to see changed in Vector? Concrete suggestions. For me, I'd like to see it become a responsive skin (in the process, killing MobileFrontend) and I'd like to see some of the gradients removed (or at least re-evaluated). Those are concrete, actionable items that will likely get resolved this year. Your turn!
MZMcBride