On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 12:04 PM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
That was unfortunate - I've been ridiculed (by
Max) for things I've said
before as well, I feel your pain Ori.
That said however, I generally agree with this piece. I have more faith
than the author seems to have that we are on the right track to doing
better work in the future, but the points made are pretty valid. It's
difficult, but very important, to observe mistakes made in the past as to
not repeat those mistakes in the future.
A few of MZ's points make a lot of sense. It's sad, unfortunate and
pretty unacceptable that we're been shipping features with no
anti-vandalism or spam protection. Some of the newer interfaces do
indeed look pretty childish. AFT, in it's current form really doesn't
provide a lot of useful feedback.
That said, a number of the points are misguided. FlaggedRevs is a poor
example to be used by either the foundation or the community.
FlaggedRevs is a perfect example of how design by committee (where the
committee is the community) utterly fails. FlaggedRevs should be used
by both the foundation and the community as an example of a project
that failed because the community designed something by committee and
the foundation went along with those plans. We should never forget
this lesson.
LiquidThreads was also originally community designed. The maintainer
added every feature under the sun that the community requested, which
lead it to become a bloated and difficult to maintain piece of
software. The original design was flawed in that it used wiki pages
and wiki page revisions for storage, which leads to it being unusable
at scale. We should take this as an example of why we should avoid
featuritis as much as possible and that we should consider scalability
in initial designs to be a crucial feature.
I think the major problem with the Op-Ed is that he points the blame
fully at the foundation when the blame is a combination of the
foundation and the community. A major part of the problem is that the
feedback from the community is almost always purely negative, and this
Op-Ed is another example of that. The flip side of that is that the
foundation communicates very poorly with the community. It's difficult
to effectively communicate with the community because our
communication tools suck. Our communication tools suck because it's
very difficult to change them because it's difficult to get the
community to agree with changes. Welcome to the vicious circle.
One of the most important points here is about
experimenting on users; and
it should be taken seriously. I also believe strongly that, as the author
suggests, we should treat editors as colleagues rather than customers.
This assumes that we aren't currently. I challenge the assumption. Can
we get some evidence of that being the case? During the summer of
research we worked directly with the community as colleagues. There's
numerous other examples of this being the case.
It is true that MZ has a tendency to be dramatic, but
he's holding back a
lot here to make a rational point, and I hope people don't write this off
because of Max's propensity for being offensive and complaining.
I feel the Op-Ed takes a very negative approach at trying to solve
what is effectively a communication problem. MZ's constructive points
are very likely to be ignored because his negative and offensive
approach makes it difficult to discuss his points without splitting
the views into an us vs them debate.
- Ryan