[Foundation-l] drive-by site updates

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 9:50 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> IIRC,
> when adding a page to the watchlist became AJAX-y two or three years
> ago, it was announced to the community some time before it was enabled
> - and that was a rather small change.

I don't remember that, and I was the one who enabled it
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/23233>.
Generally, software changes are not announced in advance, because
there are far too many of them and most are incredibly boring, so
users won't look anyway.  The Usability Initiative switch was
announced long in advance, more publicly than any other feature
rollout I can think of offhand.  It actually had a link to opt in in
the upper right of every single page on Wikimedia wikis.  How much
more announcement can you get?

You had ample opportunity to try out the changes by opting into the
beta at any time in the last year or two.  You chose not to, and
that's fine -- you have other things to do, I'm sure.  I didn't opt in
either.  But it means you'll only notice any problems after the beta
is deployed, as you did.

There is no way this could have been avoided.  At some point, we've
gotten all the pre-deployment feedback we're going to get, and that's
when we have to deploy.  No matter how much we announce things, some
people will not have gotten the message, and will only notice things
after deployment.  There is no decision-making problem here, or at
least none that can be fixed.

If you have procedural suggestions for how large feature rollouts can
be better handled in the future, you really have to be more specific.
What exactly would you have had the Usability Initiative announce in
advance of deployment?  If they had announced every one of the dozens
of minor changes they were making, no one would have read them.  The
list would be too long.  The only useful announcement they could have
made is "We're making lots of changes, you can try them out by opting
into the beta" -- which they did, very prominently.