On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:
On Tuesday, April 9, 2013, Denny Vrandečić wrote:
Technical changes on the Wikimedia projects can be hairy. We are
currently
having a discussion about the Wikidata deployment to the Wikipedias, and there have been many examples in the past of deployments that raised discussions.
One of my statements in this discussion is that the a priori discussion
of
such features is highly undemocratic. What I mean with that is that
design
and deployment decisions are often made by a very small group, which are
in
the best case a part of the affected community, but, in many cases, even external to the affected community. So the decisions are made by a group that does not represent or is constituted by the community - which I mean with undemocratic.
This has repeatedly raised criticism. And I think that criticism is often unfair. Additionally, it is usually true (which makes is not anymore
fair,
though).
I thought that in order to discuss these design decisions with the community before hand, telling them on their respective village pump is sufficient. Not so it seems. No single channel would find acceptance to communicate with the community. This, obviously means, that it is not actionable to communicate with the community.
What about setting up a community selected body of representatives to discuss such issues beforehand? At first, it sounds like a good idea -
but
the issue is, it makes the process only more complicated without at all resolving the underlying issues. Does anyone really think that such a
body
would stop the criticism before or after the deployment of the change in question? Yeah, right. Doesn't change a thing.
So, what do I want to achieve with this Mail? Merely to ask some
community
members to be a bit more constructive in their comments. Claiming that
the
product managers and designers have no idea of the Wikimedia communities and the use of wikis is often neither help- nor truthful.
What would be even better would be to come up with processes or
mechanisms
to avoid these issues in the future. I would be very glad if the people
who
are often critically accompanying such changes would help in building effective channels for their discussion.
Any thoughts?
One system that I find a lot of potential value in is the Wikitech Ambassadors mailing list. I hope that mailing list grows and can be the place where we make announcements that should be communicated widely.
For Wikidata in particular, one tool I think you guys haven't yet used and should consider for after Phase II is launched on enwiki is a watchlist notice. This is very effective for reaching active editors about a new feature. We've used it for Editor Engagement Experiments and for mobile features announcements.
I agree, a watchlist notice can be a good option in such cases, when only one wiki or a limited number need to be notified. BTW, I gave an overview of this and other existing on-wiki broadcasting channels as part of this Wikimania talk: https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2012_-_Movement_broa... . (The TranslationNotifications extension is a newer - specialized - example that wasn't mentioned there yet.) Basically, while mailing lists and the central coordination wikis -Meta, Mediawiki.org - are good and important, it has become very clear over the years that many editors are reluctant to leave their "home wiki" and prefer to receive news and notifications there. So communications-wise the WMF projects present themselves as a huge landscape ( https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimania_2012_-_... ) of islands that can only be reached by sophisticated, expensive aircraft (CentralNotice) and shaky boats (Global message delivery) ;)
Another tool that we should consider in the near future is the upcoming notifications system for Web and email. This is potentially a powerful system. Having things like the Kurier (sp?) and Signpost delivered via notification will only make them more effective.
Yes, this has huge potential to improve the current situation. I know that such a functionality has been on the mind of the Echo (Notifications) and Flow teams for quite a while, but unfortunately it seems they had to deprioritize it at least for the coming months. See also https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35306 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43840
And we might consider doing occasional (e.g. quarterly) email announcements about major features like Wikidata and VisualEditor.
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unter
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