Hoi, When I watch Jimmy, it is a lot like Wikipedia. There is a lot I like but I do not like everything. This time was no different. However LIKE Wikipedia there is so much that I like that I will not abandon it.
The notion that the "community" is free to choose whatever negates the technical point that certain innovations are intended to NOT be backwards compatible. Choices are made all the time that are NOT backwards compatible, often it does not affect user land really and then there is supposed to be no problem. It is just a different public that "suffers" the consequences. At Wikimania the Wikidatafication of Commons was mentioned often and in many contexts. This needs to happen when we want to have multi lingual search and other goodie goodies that is the point of it all. In my understanding it is a game changer and it will change things more than what is being discussed at the moment.
I can see the Media Viewer as a precursor of these changes.
NB several of the proposals re Wikidatafication are imho a bit daft. However, the need for it is such that I prefer something that is half baked to start off with than nothing at all.
We disagree on the amount of attention that is given.. In my appreciation we do not invest in tools that affect readers that much and it only started fairly recently. It is the editors and even more so the admins / power users that have the most attention available to them. They often role their own tools and consequently are not assured of continued support for their tools. These more sophisticated users are often mistaken for the community. It certainly is the most vocal subgroup of our eco-system but it is not them we aim to serve.
I am not into second guessing what the WMF could or should do. I have opinions and they typically are about how and where I think we could do better. So my two pennies worth is that:
- Reasonator like functionality is our future for much of the information we have. - Wikipedia can have its sources but Wikidata, certainly for now, cannot be relied on having sources. Confidence is to be had by comparing the information it holds with other sources (including individual Wikipedias) - When our data is not used, we might be better off not having it.
Thanks, GerardM
On 12 August 2014 10:43, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
Some answers (in a random order).
2014-08-11 12:20 GMT+03:00 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
You know our projects, you know our licenses. If you, the "community"do
not
like what you have, you can fork. At Wikimania forking and leaving the community was very much discussed. Watch Jimbo's presentation for
instance,
he may be aghast that I quote him here but in his state of the Wiki he
made
it abundantly clear that it is your option to stay or go.
I gave up watching Jimbo's keynotes a few years ago, as I would invariably get pissed off. So, should we understand that the vast ammounts of money and resources spent on editor retention are a waste of our money? I sincerely hope this is a heat-of-the-moment argument, just like the one about closing de.wp.
Hoi, Code review should be a strictly technical process surely. However the community CANNOT decide on everything.
Agreed. How about letting the WMF decide for anonymous users and the community decide for logged-in users? Presumably, the logged-in users have access to a large panel of options and can make up their own mind if they disagree with the consensus. Of course, discussions should not disappear because of such a separation, but even become more active and hopefully less aggressive.
When you are in those conversations you realise that many complications are considered; it is not easy nor obvious. NB there is not one community, there are many with often completely diverging opinions. Technically it is not possible to always keep
backward
compatibility / functionality. We are not backward we need to stay contemporary.
As a software engineer in a publicly traded company, I understand the reasoning behind more than 90% of the decisions made by the Engineering staff - and this worries me terribly, because they *don't* work for a company. Their objectives and approaches should be different.
There are three main wiki-use-cases that should receive similar levels of attention:
- reading
- basic editing
- advanced editing
The first two receive a lot of love, but the third one not so much, it's even hindered by initiatives designed for the first two. I'm not saying that we should keep backwards compatibility forever, but since the WMF wants to deploy stuff early in order to get feedback, it should begin by offering it as a beta (they do that now), then, when reaching a decent level of stability, deploy it for anonymous users and opt-in users and only when it reaches feature-parity with the feature being replaced should it be pushed for everybody (keeping an opt-out feature for some time - months or a couple of years).
Take for instance the media viewer: the current version is useless for editors, as it has basically no controls visible by default (without scrolling). The future version, presented at Wikimania, has a lot more stuff visible on the first screen, making it much easier to use for editing. I believe that the media viewer should have been kept as opt-in for logged in users until this future version arrives.
Strainu
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