Something positive... I just wanted to express my sincere thanks to the
people who made Echo, VisualEditor and Wikidata.
Many of them happen to be my colleagues, but I thank them here as a
Wikimedian who frequently does editing workshops.
I did a workshop today, and I was really happy to have these three pieces
of software.
Echo, because a participant specifically asked whether he would get a
notification if someone reverted his edit. I was happy to say that a few
months ago a feature was deployed that does just that. A year ago I
wouldn't be able to say that.
VisualEditor, because it saved so much time, both for the newbies and for
the workshop organizers. In the past I would spend many minutes explaining
about [[]], ====, '''''', <ref name="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"> and other monstrosities. Today
I just told them to use VisualEditor. In particular, I want to thank the VE
developers for the recently released feature for editing the image
properties. A year ago I wouldn't be able to say that.
Wikidata, because many people there wrote translations of articles, and
adding interlanguage links was easy and natural. Click "Add links", pick a
language, write the title, that's it. Two years ago I would have to explain
about square brackets and colons. Some of them just did it by themselves
without even asking me.
So thank you so much.
PS: They also liked UniversalLanguageSelector for easy switching of the
interface language and for being able to effortlessly type in Amharic. I'm
really biased about this, but I do thank everybody in my team for this.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore