On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It's pretty clear that the objectives of this
project are not successfully
met at this point, and in fact have caused major problems on non-Latin
script WMF sites, and significant but less critical problems on Latin
script sites. Several factors for this have been identified in the thread -
including limited attention to the effects on non-Latin script projects,
the insertion of philosophical principles (FOSS) without a clear
understanding of the effects this would have on the outcome, and the
unwillingness to step back when a major change results in loss of
functionality.
[citation needed]
Loss of functionality? The functionality we're talking about here is
reading of Wikimedia content. It's the most core, most basic functionality
we have. In the case of VisualEditor, which picks up read-mode typography
styles, it's also editing.
Did reading suddenly become seriously impaired? No. If these things had
happened, you'd see a hell of a lot more outcry than what we've seen now.
If millions of readers and tens of thousands of editors were functionally
unable to read our content easily and smoothly, you would hear a lot more
complaints. If you didn't hear complaints, you'd probably still see a swift
drop in pageviews.[1]
Instead, what I see is this: a tiny handful of bugs raised.[2] I also see a
relatively small number of editors complaining on Village Pumps -- we have
75,000+ contributors a month. 137 of them have showed up to complain in
English so far, our largest project. Fewer in other languages. Does that
suggest to you most of our editors are having serious functional issues
reading, particularly when we had 14,000 registered users voluntarily
opt-in to the changes? For reader feedback: comments from readers (on-wiki
and off) have slowed significantly in the days since the change was
made.[3] The same look has been in place on mobile (20% of our traffic) for
more than a year with basically zero complaints.
This is the first time we've significantly changed Wikimedia typography in
many years. I do not under any circumstances suggest that everything has
gone forward with perfect smoothness. I also 100% agree it can and should
continue to improve.[4] Particularly, I agree that in the immediate future
we need to pay more attention to non-Latin wikis, though everyone keeps
saying "major problems" without actually being specific about what bugs
there are, which doesn't really help constructively. I also would prefer to
find a freely-licensed font to put first in the stack again, as soon as we
can get one that doesn't cause bugs for users on Windows systems. But to
suggest the project was a failure and that is serious loss of reading
functionality is just untrue and frankly hyperbolic.
Steven
1. Our realtime pageviews data is lacking, but HTTP requests and edit rates
for top wikis via
gdash.wikimedia.org don't seem to show unusual drops. Am
I wrong?
2. See
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63549 for tracking.
Only four are open, and they pretty minor.
3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_experience_feedback/font_sizeas
an example had many comments the first two days. As of today and
yesterday, there are a tiny handful. OTRS has not even had enough comments
to warrant creating a template response. And the number of tweets and
Facebook comments has died down to almost nothing.
4. We're going to hold a retrospective on the process around this change
later next week. That will include a public wiki page with more opportunity
for people to suggest ways the general process of Beta Features
testing/graduation can be handled better.