Risker,
I find myself unconvinced by your argumentation as I perceive it as inconsistent.
On the one hand, you suggest that before we enable the option to access data from Wikidata using either Lua or a parser function should be discussed and decided by the community beforehand - the same community, that has been informed since mid 2011 that this change is coming. You suppose that the community can actually come together and decide this globally.
On the other hand, you are not trusting the community with the use of the same feature. You say they would "weaponize" the feature, that the community will be unable to adapt to the new feature, and that it needs to discuss first how to use it, and for deployment to wait a few months (I do not fully understand why you assume that a few months will be enough to sort things out). You seem to assume that a wiki as large and active as the English Wikipedia is not resilient enough to absorb the rather minor technical change we are introducing.
It is, technically, a minor change. Socially it can lead to bigger changes -- but I found it hard to believe that anyone can predict the actual effect on the English Wikipedia community. This has to be seen and experienced, and I, for one, trust the English Wikipedia community to be as awesome as always, and to absorb and use this new features in ways no one has even imagined yet.
Also, to come back to the issue of deploying unmature code to Wikipedia: this is absolutely intentional. You say you want a mature system to be deployed on Wikipedia, not one in its infancy. I would ask you to reconsider that wish. I have been there: we have developed Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), with the intention to push it to the Wikipedias, and the system became highly usable and extremely helpful. Be it NASA, Yu-Gi-Oh fans, or the Wikimedia Foundation, SMW has found hundreds of uses and tens of thousands of users. And SMW got better and better for these use case -- to the expense of getting less and less probable to be deployed on the Wikipedias.
I would prefer to avoid this mistake a second time. Deploy early, deploy often - and listen closely to the feedback of the users and analyse the actual usage numbers. MZMcBride raises a number of very real issues that need to be tackled soon (I disagree that they are blockers, but I agree that they are important, and we are working on them). This was so far quite successful on Wikidata itself, and also for what we have deployed to the Wikipedias so far.
In all seriousness: thank you for your concerns. Having read carefully, I find that I do not share them and that I see not sufficient reason to delay deployment out of the points you mention.
A few minor comments inline in your mail below.
2013/4/8 Risker risker.wp@gmail.com
On 6 April 2013 17:27, Denny Vrandečić denny.vrandecic@wikimedia.de wrote:
Or, put differently, the Wikidata proposal has been published nearly two years ago. We have communicated on all channels for more than one year. I can hardly think of any technical enhancement of Wikipedia - ever - which was communicated as strongly beforehand as Wikidata. If, in that time,
the
community has not managed to discuss the topic, it might be because such changes only get discussed effectively after they occur.
"All channels" isn't really correct, although I can respect how difficult it is to try to find a way to communicate effectively with the English Wikipedia community.
I do not recall ever reading about Wikidata on Wiki-en-L (the English Wikipedia mailing list), and only rarely on Wikimedia-L (mainly to invite people to meetings on IRC, but less than 5% of English Wikipedians use IRC).
We have been on Signpost several times, we have been on the village pump. This is considered sufficient on the other Wikipedias.
A search over the mailing list archives shows that both lists you mentioned had discussions about Wikidata. They contained links to pretty comprehensive pages on Meta. There are pages inside of the English Wikipedia discussing Wikidata. Furthermore, we had reached out in many talks, e.g. at the last two Wikimanias, but also in smaller local events, and always supported Wikipedians to talk about it in their local communities.
Since you are saying that our communication has not been sufficient, I would be very glad to hear which channels we have missed so that we can add them in the future.
Since Wikidata phase 2 is actually a less intrusive change than phase 1, and based on the effectiveness of the discussion about phase 2 on the English Wikipedia so far, I think that a post-deployment discussion is
the
right way to go.
In what way is this less intrusive? Phase 1 changed the links to other projects beside articles, a task that was almost completely done by bots, and did not in any way affect the ability to edit or to modify the content of the articles. Phase 2 is intended to directly affect content and the manner in which it is edited.
It is less intrusive on in the sense that simply nothing happens until an editor consciously decides to do something, i.e. use the new functionality.
As well, phase 2 (dependent on implementation) requires that an editor go to a different website to modify the information on an article. There is no warning to the editor that they are leaving Wikipedia. And with the challenges that are about to happen with Firefox (the browser that is possibly the most commonly used by Wikipedians), we know that SUL is probably not going to work properly. Editors thinking they are logged in to English Wikipedia will find themselves on a strange site, not logged in, with a completely foreign editing interface. This is not the way to attract new editors, nor is it the way to keep existing ones.
I would like on which you base this last sentence. Our user feedback so far has more often used the term "addictive" than "strange". Also the numbers - about 7000 active editors, more than 100,000 edits by human editors - speak a different language. But if you have anything to support your statement, I would be extremely interested in them.
Also, a very important consideration is raised by Phoebe: Wikidata is in its current form still in its infancy, and for a well developed project like the English Wikipedia this means that the actual usage (and effect)
is
expected to be minimal in the current stage. The deployment of phase 2
this
week would merely be a start for an organic co-evolution of Wikidata and the Wikipedias in the months and years to come.
Yes, it's in its infancy. It needs to be put through its paces and problems identified and resolved. You already have a fairly significant number of projects willing to do that. Keep working with them. Why is there this insistence on putting software that is not ready for use onto projects that haven't indicated any interest in using immature software?
You seem to assume that the eleven Wikipedias currently using Wikidata phase 2 have asked us for a deployment. This was not the case (besides on Hungarian). They were informed that they would be the first Wikipedias to experience the roll out. This lead to several conversations, just as on the English Wikipedia as well.
But this can only happen 'in the wild', as a priori debates about the
possible usages of such features will remain not only too speculative,
but
also highly undemocratic due to the minimal engagement of the community
in
advance.
This is possibly the most disturbing thing I have ever read on a Wikimedia mailing list. You want to put software onto the most developed project in the entire Wikimedia community without any indication that the project is supportive of what it is intended to do, knowing that it is not actually ready for use at this point, knowing that its functions are directly in conflict with one of the project's known priorities of attracting new editors and retaining existing ones....and then you have the nerve to say that discussing how to use it would be "undemocratic"? The minimal engagement of the community in advance is the reason that deploying this software now is undemocratic.
I am sorry to have disturbed you so deeply, but I remain with my statement: based on the small engagement in this discussion, compared to the size of the English Wikipedia community, I regard this discussion as undemocratic, i.e. not representative of the editor body as a whole.
Do not misunderstand me: I am not claiming that the decision to switch on Wikidata has been democratic, or actually indeed that technical decisions in the Wikimedia Movement are in general achieved through democratic processes. I am merely noticing that I do not consider the current discussion to be any more democratic than that - I do not think that the community is represented here any better (or worse) than in the many channels we have used for communication before.
Cheers, Denny