[Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features

[Jan Kučera]

Hi Oliver,

the development progress definitely is very very slow. As a
comparison, did you watch how the web front-end of Facebook changes
within the last year? It was completely overhauled about three
times... You may object Facebook is commercial and not comparable to
Wikimedia, but this basically is not true at all sice BOTH sites
compete for the same users (editors in case of Wikimedia). I know that
comparison to any other commercial site is not welcome here, but that
is a sad point people in the community still think
commercial/noncomemrcial are two different worlds - they arent. There
is only one user, who actually does not care a lot about a site being
commercial/uncommercial... There is only one market, so Wikimedia has
to behave much like the commercial sites (of course with little
specifics to a non-profit like privacy etc.).

>From the point of this comparison, there is almost no development to
MediaWiki... this is very sad, from a multi-million budget we only
have few feauter engineers... :((( The software is a significant part
of the whole site and community, if you have bad software you will
never have great content... Features engineers should be the core of
all Wikimedia staff, it is pitty to see the reality is exactly the
other way round...

The example can be myself - I am missing chart features withint
MediaWiki/Wikipedia, I filled a bug, nothing happens, I may leave the
community for good... This is the same story over and over again.
Foundation did not really care till now...

Kozuch

2012/4/29 Oliver Keyes <okeyes at wikimedia.org>:
> Jan; we get new features fairly regularly :). At the moment we're working
> on two new pieces of software - the Article Feedback Form, v5, and New Page
> Triage (a replacement for Special:NewPages). After that we're moving on to
> a proper notifications system to allow better communication and
> participation across wikis. I appreciate the rate of progress may seem
> slow; it is worth pointing out we have a very small teem of features
> engineers (although more are being hired!) and so are limited in how many
> different things we can work on at once.
>
> On 25 April 2012 19:50, Jan Kučera <kozuch82 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> yes, there surely were comments from developers... that is positive.
>> But the result as general is still nothing at all (the feature is not
>> even nearing deployment). WMF should invest in new features. I am not
>> a dev and thus can not contribute any code.
>>
>> Kozuch
>>
>> 2012/4/25 Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah at wikimedia.org>:
>> > On 04/23/2012 01:03 PM, Jan Ku?era wrote:
>> >> Hi there,
>> >>
>> >>> If, on the other hand, you just mean "features to promote greater
>> >>> communication and networking between editors", that's a clear priority
>> -
>> >>> I'm happy to talk to people about the work we're doing, and to hear any
>> >>> suggestions along the way :).
>> >>
>> >> yes I exactly meant that. It is about making contributing not "suck".
>> >> How often does Wikipedia (=MediaWiki) get big new features??? I posted
>> >> a bug about integrating some kind of graph/chart feature
>> >> (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29806) and in 9 months
>> >> almost nothing happened... and this really sucks... beleive it or
>> >> not...
>> >>
>> >> Kozuch
>> >
>> >
>> > Hi, Kozuch.  I look at
>> >
>> > https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29806
>> >
>> > and I see that, within a day of the issue being filed, multiple
>> > experienced MediaWiki developers commented on that issue to explain what
>> > the chart software's developers would have to do in order to make it
>> > suitable for use on our sites.  I've also contacted the author of that
>> > extension to point at that bug's comments and at this procedural guide:
>> >
>> > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_an_extension_for_deployment
>> >
>> > so if you could help me in alerting the extension's author to those
>> > comments, that would be great.  Thanks!
>> >
>> > --
>> > Sumana Harihareswara
>> > Volunteer Development Coordinator
>> > Wikimedia Foundation
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Oliver Keyes
> Community Liaison, Product Development
> Wikimedia Foundation
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