[Foundation-l] Vector, a year after

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/4/4 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
>
> On 4 April 2011 16:20, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>
> > I understand that WMF's resources are limited, but the development and
> > the deployment of Vector did cost some money and also forced a lot of
> > volunteers in English and in all other language projects to make
> > adjustments to their sites. Measuring volunteer effort is harder to
> > measure than money, but it's certainly not negligible.
>
>
> If this is a valid argument - that technical changes should not be
> made if it would make work for other volunteers - then God forbid
> development continue on MediaWiki.

Of course every change makes volunteers work and it's perfectly
understandable. The problem is that sometimes it is justified and
sometimes it is not. As nifty as Vector, SimpleSearch and the new
toolbar are, i have doubts about their contributions to Wikimedia's
mission. But again, i might be wrong, and that's why i am asking what
measurements were made.

> See the current thread on
> wikitech-l about how chronically broken most site JavaScript is and
> what to do about the problem, given that freezing MediaWiki in
> perpetuity is really just not going to happen.

... I am following it closely. It is, in fact, strongly related to
this topic: Polishing and modernizing gadgets developed by volunteer
JS gurus in local projects and exporting them to other projects and
languages is a much better investment of time and money, simply
because it is quite certain that these gadgets were created to answer
real needs of real editors, whereas Vector grew out of very small
usability studies.

For example, in the Hebrew Wikipedia there was a Search and Replace
gadget long before the advent of Vector's Search and Replace dialog.
It was developed due to popular demand, bottom-up, by a volunteer, and
- here's the scariest part - without any grants. It is still used in
the Hebrew Wikipedia, probably much more often than the Vector thingy,
which is still rather useless due to bugs such as 20919 and 22801.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore