[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Erik Moeller]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 7:12 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga
<everton.alvarenga at okfn.org> wrote:

>> Speaking of template madness, the current horrible brokenness that are
>> templates seem to be on the long term roadmap to be fixed. Fixing them
>> requires breaking a whole lot, far more than a visual editor preference. Is
>> two way community dialog on how to handle that on the roadmap? It might
>> still be years and years away, but boy will it hurt, and we better brace
>> ourselves.

> It seems more possible to have a wiki software developed from scratch
> than this to happen.
>
> If sometimes a small technological fart causes a pandemonium, what can
> we say about a real technological progress?

I believe in the resilience of our community and our projects. Big
changes are messy, but we've still gone through them. In the last few
months, we have partially or completely rolled out:

- a new editor ;-)
- mobile editing
- a new login/account creation experience
- a new central login system
- a new language selection experience
- input methods for >150 languages
- automatic font delivery
- a new translation user experience
- edit suggestions for new users
- mobile web uploads
- mobile app uploads for iOS/Android
- notifications, including user mentions & thanks
- Lua support for templates
- Wikidata support for templates and countless Wikidata improvements
(development by WMDE)
- etc. etc.

Of course, all these changes are all still imperfect and all still in
motion, in many cases including wider rollout. We have a lot of work
to do to ensure we don't add too much technical debt in the process of
making these changes, fix bugs, user experience and logic errors, add
missing functionality, and reduce performance penalties wherever
possible.

But 2-3 years ago the reputation of Wikipedia was that its platform
was stagnant. That time has come to an end. We're now in the period of
the most dramatic technological change in the history of our projects.
It will take us a while to absorb the full scope and impact of these
changes, but in partnership, we can get there.

On our end, we've not built a team of community liaisons just so we
can respond on feedback pages when things break. As VisualEditor
becomes more stable and performant, my hope is that we can engage more
and more on the new opportunities, and on difficult questions.
Opportunities such as ensuring consistent templatedata coverage for
all templates, or up-to-date end-user documentation. Questions around
what kinds of templates make sense and which ones don't.

I have faith, too, that the community will come up with amazing new
ways to build on these technologies, as they already have. The
ecosystem of Wikidata applications that have already been built is
truly impressive. The adoption of Lua for templates was rapid.
Templatedata _has_ been added to many of the most common templates
already, and new gadgets using it have been written. Google Summer of
Code students are working on plugins for math and syntax highlighting,
and I'm sure we'll see many more. And so forth.

I believe in the resilience of our community and its ability to
innovate and adapt. I believe in our ability to fight well with each
other. And I believe that Wikimedia has never been a more exciting
community to be part of than today. :-)

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