[Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27

[Michael Snow]

  On 9/28/2010 4:41 PM, Risker wrote:
> On 28 September 2010 18:58, Ryan Lomonaco<wiki.ral315 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Michael Snow<wikipedia at frontier.com wrote:
>>> We would be better off with more people working
>>> seriously to figure out the best answers to the issues this feature
>>> addresses, plus whatever issues there may be with the feature itself,
>>> rather than having a debating duel about the significance of a set of
>>> polling statistics. It's like having politicians decide how to govern
>>> entirely based on opinion polls.
>> This is really a much better point than I made.
> Yes it is, and it's an important one.  Several of us had already been
> working on a plan for the second trial, and those of us discussing had
> widely agreed that it would be much more likely to be successful if more of
> the recommendations on improving the software were incorporated, thus our
> recommendation that it not proceed so rapidly.
>
> It's pretty hard to maintain motivation, though, when it's clear that the
> software's going to be a permanent feature regardless of what the project
> does or thinks, and that any further "trial" is not going to change that
> fact.
Aside from the point already made regarding the desires of projects 
other than the English Wikipedia - I guess I struggle to see what's so 
demotivating about the prospect of a feature being "permanent" in the 
sense of being written into MediaWiki code while the English Wikipedia 
community still has the full ability to decide not to implement it on 
that project. Is it the potential of having to withstand continued 
political battles seeking to have it activated? That would implicitly 
acknowledge, at the very least, that there is some need not being met, 
meaning that alternative solutions are required.

Further improved trials might get us closer to such solutions, and we 
should keep experimenting where we can. I'll reserve comment as to 
whether we have the right balance between urgency in tackling serious 
problems and exercising patience to maximize our chances of success.
> I don't often write to this list, and I realise that I sound fairly negative
> in this thread.  The fact of the matter is that I personally entered more
> articles into the first trial than any other administrator (20% of all
> articles involved), that I actively and strongly encouraged other
> administrators to do so as well, that I pushed hard to ensure that the
> largest number of editors possible received reviewer permissions, and I was
> one of the few people who trialed the version on the test wiki in the two
> weeks before it went live, finding a significant number of problems (some of
> which were addressed in advance of the release).  I was also the person who
> made sure that the WMF spokesperson with respect to the trial was in
> agreement with the prior stated position of the community, and that the
> feature would be turned off if there was not clear and unambiguous support
> for it at the end of the trial, just to make sure we were all on the same
> page.
>
> So, yes...right now I (and several other administrators who were very active
> in this trial) are very disturbed at what has happened here. We felt there
> was a clear criterion for continued use of the tool, which was worthy of our
> collective time, energy and powers of persuasion. With that in mind, it's
> almost impossible to consider developing a second trial, since it doesn't
> seem like it will matter what criteria for continued use the project
> determines.
 From this characterization, my impression is not so much that there is 
a conflict between the community consensus and the developers; much 
more, it strikes me that the extent of adoption and publicity for this 
feature remains tremendously limited, so that it's extremely difficult 
to say it's been adequately evaluated or speak of a consensus about it. 
If the Wikimedia Foundation has fallen short, then, it's not by 
disregarding the will of the community, but in a responsibility shared 
with community leaders, of gaining attention from a wider group of 
participants. I would guess that the vast majority of people actively 
involved in the English Wikipedia still barely know any of what's going 
on with this. That may be somewhat surprising to those of us who have 
been involved in Wikimedia projects for a long time and think of this as 
a perennial proposal for addressing longstanding issues. But I think not 
only do people see this proposal through very different lenses, but for 
many the lens is focused elsewhere anyway, and they are watching 
different trees in the forest. Part of the challenge is figuring out 
when and how it's appropriate to interpose "corrective" lenses to guide 
people's energy in certain directions.

--Michael Snow