[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Liam Wyatt]

On 23 July 2013 07:10, David Cuenca <dacuetu at gmail.com> wrote:

> It seems there was a problem in what the definition of success is.
> For the WMF success was to deploy the VE according to the plan and budget
> and to reach certain usage percentage.
> For the community it was a different kind of metric, maybe a more
> thoroughly tested product or a slower and progressive deployment?
>
> These kinds of misunderstandings are not uncommon, and no bad faith or
> negligence should be assumed from either side:
>
> http://www.cio.com/article/440721/Common_Project_Management_Metrics_Doom_IT_Departments_to_Failure
>
> If the deployment had been delayed or slowed down, the WMF would have
> considered it a failure according to their metrics, but maybe the comunity
> would had taken it better according to theirs...
>
> Micru
>
> I believe this is a pretty accurate analysis.

The concern is not about the validity of the Visual Editor project, or the
quality of the work being done, but about the deployment process.
Unfortunately, the rollout schedule for the visual editor was determined by
the WMF senior management months and months ago. The "1 July defaut for
en.wp" deadline was set in stone independently of the status/stability of
the software, merely to meet a self-set and arbitrary reporting deadline.
Presumably this is the same for the rest of the rollout schedule too. The
WMF engineering department have been criticised for delays in the past so I
presume the management decided to set a firm deadline in order to avoid
this critisim being made again. Unfortunately this opens them up for
justifiable criticism of releasing unfinished software. I feel very sorry
for the developers and liaison staff who have to respond to the community's
frustrations - they're doing the best they can under the circumstances that
have been forced on them - crushed between a legitimately frustrated
community an immovable management.

I recall back to the "Usability Initiative" and their designing of the
"Vector" skin. What that team did was to measure the retention rate of
registered wikimedians who were using the opt-in Beta:
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beta_Feedback_Survey If I recall
correctly, every time they hit 80% retention then they would push the
system out to a new community, add new features, or make the opt-in system
more prominent - and respond to the new issues that subsequently arose. I
thought that this was an excellent method of steadily increasing the pool
of testers and building trust.

-Liam

wittylama.com
Peace, love & metadata