Eran raises a key point. On his project, there was a significant discussion prior to the deployment. Hewiki has voluntarily, as a community, decided to participate in the early development of a tool. This is a very good thing, and one that reflects well on the hewiki community.
This process tends to be much more complex on large projects where the editorial base is highly diverse. We know that the editorial base of most of our non-English projects tends to be geographically centralized to one or only a few countries (with the likely exception of Spanish projects), and usually the majority of editors on these projects (e.g., French, German, Italian projects) live in one country and share the same cultural roots. This shared experience increases the likelihood of obtaining consensus.
English projects, particularly Wikipedia, do not have that same shared cultural, geographic or historical cohesion; as the lingua franca of more than a dozen countries, and the second language for thousands of other editors, even localized variations in usage can be a stumbling block. Add into that the fact that English Wikipedia has such a large editing community, and that there is no effective centralized communication process, and the ability of the community to develop a consensus opinion on any major topic is exponentially more difficult than on many other projects. Anyone who has spent much time on Meta knows how difficult it is to come to a consensus there; Commons seems to have been more effective in developing effective communication/discussion processes, although as I note English seems to be the prevalent language there, it must be somewhat intimidating for those who do do not include English as one of their languages.
I confess that there are many days when I envy our more cohesive, less diverse projects for their ability to come to well-discussed, well-reasoned decisions in a timely way. I think there are lessons out there for English Wikipedia to learn.
Risker/Anne
On 6 April 2013 12:47, Eran Rosenthal eranroz89@gmail.com wrote:
In hewiki we had a discussion in village pump before phase II deployment and there is a simple bureaucratic policy for converting templates to use the new {{#property}} feature: a discussion in "Wikipedia:Village pump/templates" for each template conversion before actually adding {{#property}} for it. (this "village pump for templates" was already exist to eliminate adding unnecessary extra parameters that were added without discussion) This way we can check that each conversion is both technically ok, use the correct properties from wikidata, and doesn't add unnecessary parameters.
We don't use yet the new features - as in the real world cases it isn't just {{#property}} and to enjoy the powerful features of wikidata we must use WikibaseClient Lua api, but we are in final phase of testing {{Taxobox}} (with no parameters at all. really cool!)
I would like to thank to Lydia and wikidata team - you are doing a great job.
On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 6:40 PM, legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 10:28 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Risker wrote:
Lydia, could you please point me to the discussion on *English
Wikipedia*
where the community indicated an interest in deploying this software? Infoboxes and sourcing to another website completely outside the
control
of English Wikipedia is a rather big issue, and I would expect to see
a
Request for Comment with at least 200-300 participants.
I think the issue we're seeing here is that changes, particularly large changes, often aren't socialized well.
It probably doesn't help to target the English Wikipedia first, of
course,
given that it's often annoyingly exceptional. Wikidata seems like a
large
enough change that I agree that a bit more socialization might be nice. There are over 700 wikis on which to possibly deploy Wikidata, in
theory.
Wikidata phase 2 is already live on 11 different wikis. ( http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/03/27/you-can-have-all-the-data/)
MZMcBride
-- Legoktm
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