[Foundation-l] How to make unstoppable petty complaint a feature?

[William Pietri]

Thanks for bringing this up, David.

On 05/05/2010 07:31 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> No matter how much work is put into flagged revisions on en:wp, it is
> 100% certain that it will be greeted with deafening whinging.
>
> This is not a reason not to make it as good as possible, but the
> complaint is a certainty. Anyone who's been around Wikipedia or
> Wikimedia long enough can see this is what will happen. There is no
> change that will not be greeted with complaint, significant or petty.
>
> 1. Is this a bug or a feature?
> 2. If it isn't a feature, how can we make it into one? 'Cos we really need to.
>    

I'm insanely busy with non-Wikipedia stuff for the next couple days, and 
hope to come back to this more later. But even as a person fully 
expecting to be the target for a lot of the grumbling, I wanted to come 
out in favor of the complaining, or at least some of it.

Good software development is a dialog between the makers and the users. 
Through use and discussion, we jointly learn what the product should be. 
The future is not generally foreseeable, but we can at least react as 
swiftly and smartly as possible to new learning as it comes in. This is 
only possible with an engaged audience, and for better or worse, people 
are much more likely to speak up when they see a problem than when they 
are happy.

What I'd love is a way to foreground the reasonable, thoughtful, and 
actionable complaints, while attenuating the other ones. Productive 
complaints tend to be specific, personal, actual (as opposed to 
hypothetical), limited in scope, future-oriented, practical, and aware 
of the situation. E.g., "When I do X, I have problem Y that could be 
fixed in way Z." Or, "When I observe a novice user doing A, they are 
confused about B, and we could make it clearer in way C, but there's a 
risk we will impact people in situation D."

Having no time machine, the FlaggedRevs team can't do anything about the 
past, but we're very eager to improve the future, and clear, actionable 
community feedback is vital for that.

How to achieve that, I dunno, but we do have a lot of collective talent 
in creating, cataloging, and filtering information in ways that are 
useful to readers, so it seems like we have a lot to work with. And 
perhaps the complaining can be even put to use; is there some way to get 
people to complain about bad complaints?

William