Straniu, Jimbo's comments in his keynote about forking concerned encouraging competent editors who can't work cooperatively with other people to fork in a way that would be better for everyone in the long run. I don't believe this disappointing confrontation between the WMF and volunteers were what Jimbo had in mind.
Pine On Aug 12, 2014 1:44 AM, "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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