Re: [Wikitech-l] Changes in colors of user interface

[Andre Klapper]

On Sun, 2016-12-11 at 19:48 +0200, Strainu wrote:
>  People claimed in this thread
> that your change was "almost invisible". But if just 1:1,000,000
> pageviews causes someone to notice the change, in just a month, your
> change will have affected  over 15,000 people. That's singnificant,
> IMHO.

No, because the sheer number of people that will be served a change in
the software is not the single criterion that defines significance.

> Where is this protocol you talk about laid out?

See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News

andre
-- 
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Changes in colors of user interface

[Strainu]

2016-12-11 12:13 GMT+02:00 Amir Ladsgroup :
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 3:19 PM Strainu  wrote:
>
> For 3 reasons:
> 1. While MW is open source, what gets deployed on the WMF servers is
> the legal and moral responsability of the Foundation.
>
> They have responsibility but it's limited.
>
> 2. The WMF has an 8-person "Community Liaisons" team that is dedicated
> to "inform the communities during the whole process of development of
> said software, and facilitate its adoption." [1] For me, that means
> that they should be the ones that make sure that changes that impact
> million of pages don't get left out, even if the developer forgets to
> notify anyone.
>
> It's not correct. community liaisons can't check every patch to see if it's
> going to impact users (and most patches have effect on users, even
> indirect). They built a protocol and told developers to inform them when
> they think the change is going to impact users *significantly*.

Then perhaps we need to define "significantly" to include changes that
affect every single article on every single wiki we have. If that's
not significant, I don't know what is. People claimed in this thread
that your change was "almost invisible". But if just 1:1,000,000
pageviews causes someone to notice the change, in just a month, your
change will have affected  over 15,000 people. That's singnificant,
IMHO.

Where is this protocol you talk about laid out?

>
> 3. The average wikipedian does not seem to make the difference between
> volunteer developers and employees of the WMF (this is a personal
> opinion and I might be wrong).
>
> It's horrifyingly wrong. Lots of stuff is being done by either volunteers
> or staff in their volunteer capacity. You need to correct this view. not to
> blame WMF, right?

Wrong. It's just not realistic to expect 70.000+ editors distributed
in hundreds or thousands of wikis to understand free software
development, deployments and versioning. For them, it's "the
developers" who "break the site" and that's all they want (and need)
to know. The details need to be abstracted by someone, and the WMF is
the best positioned entity to do that. I think this is already
addressed, though, since that's the role of the community liaisons.
It's just a question of how much can those people do - I ask more from
them, others want less.

Since we got to this point, I would also like to address Tyler's email
from yesterday, because it shows a similar lack of understanding of
how non-technical communities use MW. He talks about red-tape
slowing-down development, but forgets (or does not realise) that
constant tweaking to the website is in itself red-tape for smaller
communities, as it takes away valuable resources from other tasks:
most Wikipedias simply do not have a web developer with admin rights.
Also, throwing the responsability of maintaining Common.css up to date
solely on the communities without providing a minimum of heads-up and
guidance ("I don't even think this change needs to be announced")
might look like a smart thing to do, but in the long run it turns
pitilessly against the developers, as it results in even more
technical debt that they need to address when developing new features.
I think the team working on global gadgets might have some interesting
stories on this process :)


>
> Best
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Arbitrary Wikidata querying

[Eran Rosenthal]

Currently it is only possible with Lua.
The documentation is in:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikibase_Client/Lua

it is quite ugly to write such module (not cool SPARQL...) but it works,
and you can expose it with nice interface to be used in wikipages.






On Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 6:17 AM, Gergo Tisza  wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 5:30 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
>
> > A more advanced form of this Wikidata querying would be dynamically
> > generating a list of presidents of the United States by finding every
> > Wikidata item where position held includes "President of the United
> > States". Is this currently possible on-wiki or via wikitext?
> >
>
> Not directly, but there are bots which can emulate it, such as Listeria by
> Magnus:
> http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=301
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Changes in colors of user interface

[Amir Ladsgroup]

On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 3:19 PM Strainu  wrote:

For 3 reasons:
1. While MW is open source, what gets deployed on the WMF servers is
the legal and moral responsability of the Foundation.

They have responsibility but it's limited.

2. The WMF has an 8-person "Community Liaisons" team that is dedicated
to "inform the communities during the whole process of development of
said software, and facilitate its adoption." [1] For me, that means
that they should be the ones that make sure that changes that impact
million of pages don't get left out, even if the developer forgets to
notify anyone.

It's not correct. community liaisons can't check every patch to see if it's
going to impact users (and most patches have effect on users, even
indirect). They built a protocol and told developers to inform them when
they think the change is going to impact users *significantly*.

3. The average wikipedian does not seem to make the difference between
volunteer developers and employees of the WMF (this is a personal
opinion and I might be wrong).

It's horrifyingly wrong. Lots of stuff is being done by either volunteers
or staff in their volunteer capacity. You need to correct this view. not to
blame WMF, right?

Best
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