Actually, Tim, you're not giving me credit for all the other mistakes I made. :D
FWIW, lessons have been learned, and there is a new version in the works. But many people on this list have specifically said that they don't want to talk about Offwiki, and we should respect their wishes.
I did make a big mistake that's relevant to this thread when I deployed Liquid Threads on a project that shall remain nameless ;): I didn't look in to it enough to know that it would essentially take over all talk pages. I thought I had sandboxed it on a single page. I accidentally surprised my users with it, and they did not like it.
I think there is a lot of value and promise in Flow. But it is a huge paradigm shift for onwiki communication, and it must not surprise users under any circumstances. Maybe someone has the right figure handy, but I wouldn't be surprised if, after archives are added up, there is more discussion across all wikis than content. If so, one might argue that this is a bigger change than VE and it certainly dwarfs the impact that most editors experience from the MV rollout. The WMF '''must''' get this one right. And that's not possible without our help.
When I see that a problem I care about needs to be solved, my first question is "what can I do to help?" Telling others what they can do is just too easy; after all, it's not like I commit to making an effort in doing so. So, starting with myself, I'd say the first step is figuring out what the community's expectations are in building and rolling out the release. How can I help prevent the WMF's simply making a death march to a debacle by ignoring our expectations? Maybe organizing our thoughts might help.
Here's a start to a list based on stuff I've read here so far:
1) The WMF should not only involve the community in setting feature priority, but commit to honoring community sentiment when it is expressed overwhelmingly on any given feature. A very rough example would be something like if there are 250 more "increase priority" votes than "decrease priority" votes, the feature would be bumped up.
2) Priorities should be fully transparent to the community, and they should mean something. For example, all "must-haves" must be implemented before any "should-haves" are worked on.
3) User studies should be invoked to convince the community that something is of value to users who may not have as much experience, and not offered as an excuse while shoving features down the community's throat.
4) (My own addition, here) A mechanism to make it easy to gather community feedback and quantify community sentiment '''in one place per feature''' should be set up. No hopping from onwiki to bugzilla to trello to whatever the WMF engineering team decides they want to use next. If the WMF wants to use a new tool, it should integrate with the toolset we're already used to IMO so that information doesn't get lost behind links.
,Wil
On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 2:43 PM, Tim Davenport shoehutch@gmail.com wrote:
I really don't like the way that people are referring to Flow as a done deal with an inevitable roll out. Nothing remotely close to workable software has been produced, no case has been made that the purported problems being addressed by this top-down software project are valid issues in the community, the range of unintended effects that will be cause by the mass archiving of talk pages and move to a new "flashy" system hasn't been properly assessed.
With Visual Editor, there was a clear need for WYSIWYG capabilities — although the software rolled out was grossly inadequate and the roll out process hamhanded (not to say incompetent). With Media Viewer, at least there is a clear benefit to a certain percentage of WP readers to offset the inconveniences resulting from mildly inadequate software. With Flow we are looking at the potential of grossly inadequate software with no apparent "saving graces" other than the fact that the old software is old and the new software will be new and that things will look nice.
If this is done wrong, it will be a catastrophe for WMF far bigger than what happened with VE.
Wil Sinclair, an enthusiast for the LiquidThreads/Flow mechanism for talk pages, is in an excellent position to give us some A/B numbers for participation at his site, with in without LiquidThreads being imposed from above.
How did that work out with participation levels at the OffWiki site, Mr. Sinclair?
How many very active editors has the convenient LiquidThreads mechanism generated for your site?
How many edits have taken place in the month after LiquidThreads was installed over "community" objections versus the month before it was installed?
Has the clean up process been easy reconverting to MediaWiki without the LiquidThreads extension?
Bottom line: OffWiki site participation was blown up by a unilateral move to LiquidThreads by the "tech department."
Observe and learn.
Tim Davenport Carrite on WP /// Randy from Boise on WPO Corvallis, OR
=======
Wil Sinclair wrote:
This somewhat circuitously brings us back to the subject. We have a
chance to rollout Flow the right way. There are some questions that come to mind that might tell us if we're headed for a big win or a bigger debacle:
- Is the WMF working with the community as closely and substantially
as possible to make sure Flow is ready for primetime?
- Is the community preparing itself for a major change, not only in
interface, but to some degree in wiki-philosophy about how discussions are conducted- not to mention the notion that, while wiki software can do almost anything involving asynchronous online communication, it can't do everything as well as other interfaces?
I think Flow will be particularly challenging. I deployed Liquid
Threads on another site. I liked the threaded interface, as did others. But overall it was roundly rejected because it was harder to search (I only found out you have to add the namespace to the searchable namespace in LocalSettings.php later), and it invasively took over all discussion pages, among other headache. Problems like these could easily be addressed before a rollout, but they should be addressed as early as possible. It is notable, however, that the more our users used it, the more they seemed to like it.
What can we do to make the Flow rollout as smooth as starting '''now'''?
,Wil _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe