[Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

[Erik Moeller]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 10:56 AM, David Goodman <dggenwp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Basically, you (in the plural)  thought you could do better than the
> consensus, and therefore simply without rejecting it , did not implement it
> while you tried other things first.   All these trials would have been
> good, ''had they been done before implementation.'' I am waiting for
> someone from the foundation to come out and agree to that, a recognition
> that the error was that they needed to be done first.

Hi David,

I'm a little bit lost as to what you're referring to here, is this
about the decision to not reinstate the orange notifications bar after
the Echo rollout? If so, I already clarified [1] that I felt that we
didn't do a good job recognizing the likely impact of this change
earlier and addressing it more systematically upfront. We've since
implemented a compromise, and work is continuing to iterate on this
and other aspects of the new notifications system.

In general, for features rollouts (and if we want to talk more about
this, we should really split the thread), my recommendation is to
adopt a beta->production mode switch similar to the mobile site, which
will give us a generalized way to test new features with users who are
willing to do so, while not committing us to provide an opt-out
preference or mode switch for every new feature (which, while an easy
way to appease upset users, is also a recipe for technical debt). Had
Echo been available in beta on en.wp for a while before being
activated, I think the rollout could have been a lot smoother.

All best,
Erik

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Notifications&diff=prev&oldid=553547662

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