On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Risker risker.wp@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.