[Foundation-l] drive-by site updates

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 22:44, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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?

The Usability Initiative was announced, but the search box hardly so.
It was only announced in the technical blog and i actually read it and
tried it in the prototype wiki, but as the prototype wiki says itself,
it is not a real wiki, so i didn't see the bug there.

(To avoid any possible confusion, i don't refer to the search box's
location, but to the fact that it's nearly impossible to use it for
searching. The location change was part of the beta; a lot of people
didn't like it, but i am not talking about that.)

> 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

I did choose to. I also convinced a few people in he.wikipedia to try
it. I also reported several Vector bugs to Bugzilla and fixed Vector
support for Hebrew in Commons (with help from Eran and Slomox).

The search box changes were not part of the beta on Wikipedia. If i
could choose to test it, i would, but it went from the labs straight
into production.

> If you have procedural suggestions for how large feature rollouts can
> be better handled in the future, you really have to be more specific.

The skin was beta-tested in the live Wikipedia. The editing toolbar
was beta-tested in the live Wikipedia. The search box was not
beta-tested in the live Wikipedia, but only in the labs and apparently
it wasn't enough.

So, quite simply, don't roll out major interface changes without
beta-testing them in the live Wikipedia.

There are issues from the beta-test stage that are still not resolved
and it would be better if they were, but i am not complaining about
that here.

> 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.

See above - the search box not part of the beta.

The rather minor (IMHO) change in Google's search box that was rolled
out recently became headline news all over the world. Wikipedia is not
far behind Google in popularity. So the complete revamping of
Wikipedia's search box is not a minor change by any measure.

-- 
אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
Amir Elisha Aharoni

http://aharoni.wordpress.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore