Hey guys,
I use MediaViewer, I like it, and I am happy to trust the WMF product team to build stuff. I didn't know about the RFC, but even if I had I would've been unlikely to have participated, because I don't think small opt-in discussions are the best way to do product development -- certainly not at the scale of Wikipedia.
I think we should aim on this list to be modest rather than overreaching in terms of what we claim to know, and who we imply we're representing. It's probably best to be clear --both in the mails we write and in our own heads privately-- that what's happening here is a handful of people talking on a mailing list. We can represent our own opinions, and like David Gerard we can talk anecdotally about what our friends tell us. But I don't like it when people here seem to claim to speak on behalf of editors, or users, or readers, or the community. It strikes me as hubristic.
Thanks, Sue On 10 Jul 2014 16:13, "MZMcBride" z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
In this case, we will keep the feature enabled by default (it's easy to turn off, both for readers and editors), but we'll continue to improve it based on community feedback (as has already happened in the last few weeks).
Thanks for the reply. :-)
If your feature development model seemingly requires forcing features on users, it's probably safe to say that it's broken. If you're building cool new features, they will ideally be uncontroversial and users will actively want to enable them and eventually have them enabled by default. Many new features (e.g., the improved search backend) are deployed fairly regularly without fanfare or objection. But I see a common thread among unsuccessful deployments of features such as ArticleFeedbackv5, VisualEditor, and MediaViewer. Some of it is the people involved, of course, but the larger pattern is a fault in the process, I think. I wonder how we address this.
MZMcBride
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