If I remember correctly, I think that's how the Content Translation project
started -- it was someone's personal project, which got more people and
attention because it's a great idea and showed real success.
That is not accurate. I think Content Translation is a good example of
bottom-up and design-driven project, though.
The Language team identified that users frequently were asking for better
support for translating Wikipedia articles, and decided to learn from
existing translators (and their heavily manual efforts) without a
predefined idea of how the solution would look like. After many iterations
of design, prototyping and research the team started building the tool
iteratively and driven by user behaviour (based on metrics and more user
research). I wrote a more detailed piece about this some time ago if anyone
is interested in more details:
So while this project didn't came from top-down roadmap, it was also not a
solo "cowboy-style" personal project.
I definitely think it followed a good pattern for more projects to consider.
Pau
On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 4:40 AM, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 7:53 PM, Yuri Astrakhan
<yastrakhan(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
And that got me thinking. WMF, an organization that was built with the
open
and community-driven principles - why have we
became the classic example
of
a corporate multi-level hierarchy? Should we
mimic a living organism
rather
than a human-built pyramid?
This may sound naive and wishful, but could we have a more flat and
flexible team structure, where instead of having large teams with
sub-teams, we would have small self-forming teams "by interest". For
example, someone decides to dedicate their 20% to building support for
storing 3D models in wiki.
So glad to see this being discussed in the open with smart folks like
Brion, Dario, et al.
3D support would be most welcome – we’re in a holding pattern with
Smithsonian 3D GLAM projects in DC because of that shortcoming in Commons.
It was never known whether anyone was paying attention or going to put 3D
on the radar screen. (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T3790)
At my keynote talk at Wikiconference USA, I said one of the things WMF
“must do” is multimedia and interactivity. Your work on the interactive
graph is a great step. Brion, myself and others have been working on
collaborative video. Brion’s ogv.js work is a great example of skunkworks
type projects having a huge impact.
And if 3D is given a priority, the three areas would be a great collective
step towards Wikipedia continuing its revolutionary work. Best of all, they
would be technologies developed in service of content and community needs,
and not simply created for tech’s sake.
An organism reacts to the change of its environment by redistributing
resources to the more problematic areas. Would
small, flexible, and more
focused teams achieve that better?
Yes, and in a recent meeting you mentioned Bell Labs as a model. As someone
who worked there, it’s a very good ideal to shoot for.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/2016-02-16_Discussing_Knowledge_En…
Thanks for opening up this discussion.
-Andrew
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