[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Erik Moeller]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 9:42 PM, Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I still don't see a reflection in your mail that you take the feedback from local communities seriously.

Romaine, we're not ignoring feedback. I'm asking James to weigh in
with some details relative to the issues raised that are specific to
applying VisualEditor to the Dutch Wikipedia content and template
corpus, so we can make a final assessment on whether these issues are
severe enough to justify a delayed deployment there.

>From what I'm seeing on the feedback page, these are (as is often the
case) typically related to specific template constructions. That's
generally what's going to be most likely to bite us during the
cross-language rollout: each Wikipedia uses a very different set of
templates, and some template constructions are inherently fragile.

For example, from the feedback page, it doesn't surprise me that a
construction like

[[File:Bla.jpg|{{largethumb}}|Some caption]]

where {{largethumb}} contains only the text "260px|thumb", may cause
problems in VE :-). It is somewhat reassuring to only see a single
interlanguage link to nds-nl on that template.

To be clear, as we go forward, we'll need to determine what kinds of
uses of templates we can and want to support. As noted earlier,
templates are used in some truly mindboggling ways, some of which
we'll simply never be able to support well.

Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation