Erik Moeller wrote:
All,
this is a quick note to let you know that we've signed on two people, William Pietri and Howie Fung, to help us on a contract basis with the deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia.
William is an IT consultant and systems/software engineer; see his userpage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri -- he is also a long-time Wikipedian. He will support the overall roll-out coordination and requirements planning.
Howie is an experienced Product Manager who previously worked with Real Networks/Rhapsody and PayPal; see LinkedIn profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=3830901.
We met Howie during our search for the Multimedia Usability Product Manager position, and were impressed by his background, particularly with regard to user focused product development, and some great first thoughts he sent us on how to improve the usability of Wikimedia Commons. Given his background, we thought it would be great to have his help in doing some more systematic analysis of usability, terminology and workflow issues with the proposed English Wikipedia roll-out.
We are eager to roll out the "Flagged Protection" functionality soon. As Howie and William get up to speed, they'll post info on remaining work, and get community feedback on what's vital to have before the first release.
What exactly is William going to be doing? From what I understood, all of the coding work is basically done and enwiki has settled on a configuration (and if there is coding work to do, it seems like it would make more sense to hire someone who is already familiar with the FlaggedRevs/MediaWiki code).
As far as usability goes, FlaggedRevs has been in use on other large projects (German Wikipedia, English Wikinews) for quite a while now, and I know the eventual goal has been to have this on the English Wikipedia, why did we wait until now to start studying this?
This seems like it has the potential to introduce even more delays into something that people are already impatient for.