Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 2 Mar 2010, at 01:18, MZMcBride wrote: You know what sounds toxic? The claim that a man is a new resident in the area and a known child molester. That's been in one of our articles for months and months; the only provided source is a dead link that's part of an advocacy site. Reverted last night by Wjhonson, for anyone wondering: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=West_Memphis_3action=historysubmitdiff=347211677oldid=346894057 Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 8:18 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: You know what sounds toxic? The claim that a man is a new resident in the area and a known child molester. That's been in one of our articles for months and months; the only provided source is a dead link that's part of an advocacy site. You think people are going to actually fact check links before flagging an edit. Ha! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 12:16 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: Hoi, Some will, the ones that don't do a reasonable job may lose their flagging capability or get flagged as an appreciation for the quality of their work. Thanks, GerardM PS Please be a bit more considerate, a bit more positive ... C'mon Gerard, I'm not going to pretend that flagged revisions, as currently proposed to be implemented, is going to be a magical silver bullet, just so I can be positive and upbeat (and considerate???). The fact of the matter is that I am quite convinced that the current proposed implementation of flagged revisions is going to help very little, and in some instances may actually make things worse. Yes, I realize the decision has already been made to go ahead and implement this feature. And I'm hoping along with the rest of you that it gets implemented as soon as possible. But I'm not going to pretend it's a particularly good idea. I hope it gets implemented as soon as possible because once it does maybe people can see its failure and start thinking about some real solutions. The ones that don't do a reasonable job may lose their flagging capability? What's a reasonable job? Are people *supposed* to fact-check everything before they flag an edit? Are they *supposed* to verify all references? What if those references aren't available online? Would the person who flagged the edit about What are we currently doing when people edit about JM Sr. lose her flagging capability? Would she even be admonished? The source most likely was not broken at the time it was added. It wasn't a particularly good source, but can you imagine the Wikipedia community taking away flagging privileges over a dispute over the reliability of a source? Is [[User:W guice]] going to be admonished for this edit ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=West_Memphis_3diff=336279698oldid=334567668). S/he made a typographical fix to the paragraph in question. Has anyone even found the person who added the paragraph in the first place? Is that person going to lose their editing capability for not doing a reasonable job? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 18:37, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: I hope it gets implemented as soon as possible because once it does maybe people can see its failure and start thinking about some real solutions. Are you aware of the fact that it's been used in non-English wikipedias for years? And it's been quite a successful feature. YMMV. grin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 21:36, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: Are you aware of the fact that it's been used in non-English wikipedias for years? And it's been quite a successful feature. Years is a bit of an exaggeration. German Wikipedia was first and that was May 6, 2008. That's a little under 2 years. I stand corrected. It's been used for more than a year now, ... Much better, you're right. ;-) I don't think anyone has actually done any objective review of its success. Which does not imply it's been a failure. But generally my measure would be a) bad mood/stress level of the editors doing patrolling (which by my educated guess went down), and b) the incidents of indecent/unwanted content appearing for the wide public (which by my observation definitely went down, my guess is close to zero). There are people who thought it's a miracle and now disappointed that it wasn't. It doesn't solve world peace, hunger, and article quality problems, among other things. But what it does is basically make usual vandalism pointless. At least on my home wiki, huwp. Still it's okay for me to have it implemented and let people to see _whether_ it's a failure. -- byte-byte, grin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 3:28 PM, Peter Gervai grin...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 18:37, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: I hope it gets implemented as soon as possible because once it does maybe people can see its failure and start thinking about some real solutions. Are you aware of the fact that it's been used in non-English wikipedias for years? And it's been quite a successful feature. I'm aware of the fact that a different form of it than the one proposed for the English Wikipedia, has been used for quite a while on the German Wikipedia (apparently May 6, 2008). I assume other language Wikipedias have followed suit. I'm not aware of how successful it was on the German Wikipedia, and I'm also not aware of how closely the problems and cultures of the German Wikipedia are to the English Wikipedia. I'd love to hear any insights you have on this. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 4:04 PM, Peter Gervai grin...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 21:36, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I don't think anyone has actually done any objective review of its success. Which does not imply it's been a failure. No, of course not. What it implies is that a claim that it's been quite a successful feature should be disregarded unless and until some actually objective review is presented. But generally my measure would be a) bad mood/stress level of the editors doing patrolling (which by my educated guess went down), and b) the incidents of indecent/unwanted content appearing for the wide public (which by my observation definitely went down, my guess is close to zero). There are people who thought it's a miracle and now disappointed that it wasn't. It doesn't solve world peace, hunger, and article quality problems, among other things. But what it does is basically make usual vandalism pointless. At least on my home wiki, huwp. Still it's okay for me to have it implemented and let people to see _whether_ it's a failure. Okay, good point, you're right. I've been known to be wrong from time to time, so I should leave room for the possibility that this is one of those times. Maybe it will be a success. Maybe it'll cut down drastically on the stupid obvious vandalism, thereby freeing people up to concentrate on the tricky subtle vandalism. Or maybe the culture of the English Wikipedia is just drastically different from the Hungarian Wikipedia, and the total amount of vandalism won't go down much at all - it'll just get trickier and more subtle, and the vandal-fighters will wind up spending more time and not less. Unfortunately, if I had to bet, I'd bet on the latter. In any case, the kind of problem which Mr. McBride (?) was complaining about doesn't fall under usual vandalism anyway. Anthony ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
I'm not really interested in debating about how well the implementation of Flagged Revisions has gone/is going. But I would like to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see the project using PivotalTracker. It's been easy for me to keep updated on the work being done since I started checking on it. Thanks to whomever set that up, and thanks to everyone at the Foundation level involved with FlaggedRevs for taking the time to make sure it's implemented well. Steven Walling On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 12:32 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 1 March 2010 06:51, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: And in the future people want to know about something, just drop me a note off list and say, Hey, William! I was wondering about X, and I'd bet other people are too. I'm entirely happy to keep people apprised on pretty much anything, but I don't want to gratuitously spam the inboxes of the eight zillion busy people on these lists until I have something useful to announce. Thanks for your work on this. Project manager may be defined as all the responsibility and none of the actual power, so good luck with it too ;-) Suggestion: weekly updates (to en:wp Village Pump and wikien-l, perhaps), with whatever there is to report, including nothing. People hear nothing and worry and get upset - you can see the frantic activity below the surface, everyone else just sees a duck sitting on a pond. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
It's a simple question: what the fuck is the hold-up for FlaggedRevisions on the English Wikipedia? Thanks, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 02/28/2010 03:26 PM, MZMcBride wrote: It's a simple question: what the fuck is the hold-up for FlaggedRevisions on the English Wikipedia? If people have questions like this, I'd encourage them to drop me a note before they get to the swearing-in-frustration stage. I try to check my talk page at least daily, and I must check my email 20 times a day. There's no benefit to getting wound up; surplus angst does not help either the coding or the communicating about it. As I mentioned in the blog post, you can follow the software development progress in detail here: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157 As you can see, we have a bunch of completed changes that need to be deployed to an environment where we can get real feedback on them. Once we get the feedback from the community, we'll have a better idea of how close we are to releasing to the English Wikipedia. The thing we're working on right now is moving flaggedrevs.labs to different hardware. That site is currently running on the production cluster, and we can't release new test versions of the software there without risk of trouble for production wikis using FlaggedRevs. Rob Halsell has recycled an old server for our use, and we are working to get it configured in a way that's enough like the production environment that we will have some confidence that a successful test there will mean a successful rollout on the English Wikipedia. Unfortunately, the production environment is complicated, and Rob has a lot on his plate, probably too much, so this is taking a while. As soon as that's ready, I will be very excited to put up test versions of both the English Wikipedia and the German one, so that the community can test, give feedback, and opine on whether it's ready to go. William ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
William Pietri wrote: If people have questions like this, I'd encourage them to drop me a note before they get to the swearing-in-frustration stage. I try to check my talk page at least daily, and I must check my email 20 times a day. There's no benefit to getting wound up; surplus angst does not help either the coding or the communicating about it. When it's your biography that reads you once were convicted of murder or pedophilia or whatever else, then you can start talking about people being wound too tight. When it's only been a delay of a few weeks, then you can talk about which forum should be used and so forth. As I mentioned in the blog post, you can follow the software development progress in detail here: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157 The primary issue with that site is that any sense of deadline is a ever-shifting goalpost. Launch on English Wikipedia has a target date of when? It looks like it was added December 16, though that information wasn't particularly easy to figure out. Which, of course, begs the question why an entirely separate layer of software was added to this project in the first place when Bugzilla was already available and familiar. As you can see, we have a bunch of completed changes that need to be deployed to an environment where we can get real feedback on them. Once we get the feedback from the community, we'll have a better idea of how close we are to releasing to the English Wikipedia. What I see is literally zero activity on that site since December 17, 2009. All of the tasks appear to have been created on December 16 or 17 and nearly all of them are in the Deliver phase, which reads to me as though they haven't been done. I did get the software to output Found 32 stories (93 points total, 0 points completed) for the user JAS and the Done button at the top opened an empty box. Point to me what I'm missing. The thing we're working on right now is moving flaggedrevs.labs to different hardware. That site is currently running on the production cluster, and we can't release new test versions of the software there without risk of trouble for production wikis using FlaggedRevs. Production wikis like... the German Wikipedia? What the hell are you talking about? Update flaggedrevs.php for the enwiki database, sync it to the servers, and let's see what happens. How does that sound? As soon as that's ready, I will be very excited to put up test versions of both the English Wikipedia and the German one, so that the community can test, give feedback, and opine on whether it's ready to go. When might that be? Is there a specific deadline? If not, why? And if there is a deadline and it slips by yet again, what's the consequence to those running the project? MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 2/28/2010 10:32 PM, MZMcBride wrote: William Pietri wrote: As soon as that's ready, I will be very excited to put up test versions of both the English Wikipedia and the German one, so that the community can test, give feedback, and opine on whether it's ready to go. When might that be? Is there a specific deadline? If not, why? And if there is a deadline and it slips by yet again, what's the consequence to those running the project? I second this. Are William and Howie just under contract indefinitely until FlaggedRevs is finally ready? Who are they responsible to, and why is that person apparently not giving them any sort of priorities (like, creating a plan or a deadline)? Why is there such little transparency in this whole process? Rather than use the normal bug tracker that all other MediaWiki developers use and that the community is used to, they're using some entirely separate one, hosted on a 3rd party website. As far as I can tell, there's only been one unprompted communication with the community regarding this - the techblog post in January that had little new information. Its been more than 4 months, and we haven't been able to get even a vague timeline yet. IMO, setting a deadline, missing it, and explaining why it was missed is better than not setting a deadline until you know you can meet it (which kind of defeats the purpose of setting it). -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 02/28/2010 07:32 PM, MZMcBride wrote: When it's your biography that reads you once were convicted of murder or pedophilia or whatever else, then you can start talking about people being wound too tight. When it's only been a delay of a few weeks, then you can talk about which forum should be used and so forth. There's no need to persuade me of the value of Flagged Revisions. I already think the project is important, or I wouldn't be working on it. My point is that drama will slow things down, not speed things up. My long experience is that people swearing at programmers impedes progress. You should decide which you're after. I figure it's progress, which is why I mentioned it. What I see is literally zero activity on that site since December 17, 2009. All of the tasks appear to have been created on December 16 or 17 and nearly all of them are in the Deliver phase, which reads to me as though they haven't been done. I did get the software to output Found 32 stories (93 points total, 0 points completed) for the user JAS and the Done button at the top opened an empty box. Point to me what I'm missing. Seeing a Deliver button means that Aaron, the developer, thinks the item is done, but it is not yet visible to others. Once we have a test server where people can look at things, then they are delivered. When some non-developer (e.g., me, or Howie Fung of the usability team) verifies that they are actually done, only then do we mark them as done. Production wikis like... the German Wikipedia? What the hell are you talking about? Update flaggedrevs.php for the enwiki database, sync it to the servers, and let's see what happens. How does that sound? Like a recipe for breaking one of the world's top ten websites, an outcome I would rather avoid. There have been substantial changes to the code. We don't want to break either the English or German Wikipedias, so we test before shipping. This is not an unusual approach to running a production web site. Measure twice, cut once, works even better in software than carpentry. Also, the community doesn't yet believe the software is ready, at least judging by the last round of feedback on the labs site. The usability team and I agreed with that, as did others, which is what motivated this latest round of changes. As important as it is to get FlaggedRevs out for the community to try, I think it's even more important to release it in a form that will yield a successful trial. If we release something that's not up to snuff, the community may reject it for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual idea, an outcome nobody wants. When might that be? Is there a specific deadline? If not, why? And if there is a deadline and it slips by yet again, what's the consequence to those running the project? There is no specific deadline. The approach I thought best for this project was one where we measure actual progress and use that to project dates. (That's why I used Pivotal Tracker, a tool designed for tracking and measuring real, fine-grained progress.) I explain more here: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/flagged-revisions-your-questions-answered/ It's a pretty standard approach in any of the [[Agile Software Development]] processes. As soon as we can release to labs and check out the new stuff, which I ardently hope is soon, we'll have some useful data on productivity. If everybody feels the new version is ready to go live, then I am not aware of any impediment to public release right after that decision. If, as seems likely, there are some further proposed changes, we'll be able to estimate development time and project dates. As to consequences, we all serve at the pleasure of Danese Cooper most directly, and to Erik, Sue, and the board from there, so if they think we're doing a bad job I'm sure they'll deal with that. However, in my experience everybody involved is smart, talented, and very committed to the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation. Everybody is also keenly aware that this is a high-profile, high-priority project. Menacing people like that with consequences mainly serves to destroy motivation, not create it, so if you're truly interested in getting this done, I ask you not to do that again. William ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
I finally figured out that the view history button in Pivotal Tracker is where all the relevant details are. For each of the items I'm looking at, Aaron appears to have completed them 2 months ago. But they're not marked as finished because you and Howie haven't done so? What's the hold-up exactly? (And isn't this yet another reason you should be using something less brain-dead than Bugzilla. I never thought it was possible to find worse issue tracking software, but leave it to Wikimedia) William Pietri wrote: There's no need to persuade me of the value of Flagged Revisions. I already think the project is important, or I wouldn't be working on it. My point is that drama will slow things down, not speed things up. My long experience is that people swearing at programmers impedes progress. You should decide which you're after. I figure it's progress, which is why I mentioned it. Are you a programmer? The programmers seem to be the ones who have done their jobs here. This isn't a development issue by the looks of it, it's a management issue. And I'm swearing at the management (see e-mail subject line). There have been substantial changes to the code. We don't want to break either the English or German Wikipedias, so we test before shipping. This is not an unusual approach to running a production web site. Measure twice, cut once, works even better in software than carpentry. Actually, historically that hasn't been the trend. The site has been broken countless times, not that that's a goal anyone should be aiming for. I suppose it's as good an excuse as any for the complete mishandling of this project, though. (In your defense, this was a clusterfuck before you arrived, so you don't get the full blame here.) Also, the community doesn't yet believe the software is ready, at least judging by the last round of feedback on the labs site. I watch a live feed of every edit and action to the FlaggedRevisions labs site http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org and I've been the one doing the admin promotions on there since September 2009. Can you point to where you're seeing this feedback you're talking about? The usability team and I agreed with that, as did others, which is what motivated this latest round of changes. Where are the comments from the Usability team? I've been idling in their IRC channel for the past few months. Here's every mention of flagged that I have: http://paste.pocoo.org/show/184170/ Who exactly is working on these user interface issues? What are they doing? I'm curious. And shouldn't I be able to see all of this Usability work at your Pivotal Tracker? I don't. There is no specific deadline. The approach I thought best for this project was one where we measure actual progress and use that to project dates. (That's why I used Pivotal Tracker, a tool designed for tracking and measuring real, fine-grained progress.) I can't say unequivocally that Pivotal Tracker is the worst issue tracker to exist, but it's certainly the most user-unfriendly I've personally ever encountered. As soon as we can release to labs and check out the new stuff, which I ardently hope is soon, we'll have some useful data on productivity. You ardently hope? Aren't you the person in charge of this project? If not, what exactly do you do day-to-day and who is in charge of getting FlaggedRevisions enabled on the English Wikipedia? If everybody feels the new version is ready to go live, then I am not aware of any impediment to public release right after that decision. Unlike the impediments you've been throwing up in this thread and that others have been throwing up over the past months and years? Originally it was getting the software mostly finished. That happened, and Erik announced that any project could request FlaggedRevisions. Then it became an issue of user interface (and oh-my-god usability). Then a hardware issue (though that turned out to be mostly, if not completely, bunk). I wonder what the next boogeyman will be. Perhaps http://bit.ly/djkLDa ? If, as seems likely, there are some further proposed changes, we'll be able to estimate development time and project dates. You've said in this very thread that there is no specific deadline. Now you're saying the opposite? Estimating development time and project dates sounds like a deadline to me. Why can't we have one of those? Why can't there be a specific date by which FlaggedRevisions will be enabled on the English Wikipedia. That's what I'm after. As to consequences, we all serve at the pleasure of Danese Cooper most directly, and to Erik, Sue, and the board from there, so if they think we're doing a bad job I'm sure they'll deal with that. Is Danese alive? I haven't seen her on a public mailing list, IRC channel, or wiki since she was hired. At all. Everybody is also keenly aware that this is a high-profile, high-priority project. High-profile, high-priority? This has been in development for years and years
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
Hi, Alex. Good questions. On 02/28/2010 08:10 PM, Alex wrote: When might that be? Is there a specific deadline? If not, why? And if there is a deadline and it slips by yet again, what's the consequence to those running the project? I second this. Are William and Howie just under contract indefinitely until FlaggedRevs is finally ready? Who are they responsible to, and why is that person apparently not giving them any sort of priorities (like, creating a plan or a deadline)? As to who I'm responsible to, that was Erik Moeller and is becoming Danese Cooper. We of course have a plan, which is publicly posted, and which I'm glad to answer questions on. Elsewhere in this thread (and in the blog post) I've explained why I haven't just made up an arbitrary deadline, but am instead trying to measure productivity and project a date. If you have further questions on this, let me know. Regarding incentives, I believe that this project borrowed Howie part time from the Usability Team, who will welcome having him back when we're done. For my part, I certainly have an reason to get this done soon. Like everybody, I thought this would go quicker, and I gave WMF a 70% discount from my normal rate, because heck, I love Wikipedia. But each week this goes on means a slightly larger hole in my 2010 revenue picture. A worthwhile one, to be sure, but I'd still like to keep it as small as possible. Why is there such little transparency in this whole process? Rather than use the normal bug tracker that all other MediaWiki developers use and that the community is used to, they're using some entirely separate one, hosted on a 3rd party website. See my explanation elsewhere in the thread, but basically, I'm not tracking bugs, and Bugzilla is a poor fit for the approach I thought best. I used the fastest-to-use tool that suits that approach, so as to maximize the time spent on actual work. Nobody has mentioned an issue with it until now. If people would rather I also tracked a bunch of tickets in Bugzilla we can talk about that, and I'm eager to hear other suggestions for ways to increase transparency. As far as I can tell, there's only been one unprompted communication with the community regarding this - the techblog post in January that had little new information. I've reported when I thought I had something to report, and I've certainly answered direct questions from people. I'm definitely planning to announce boldly when we actually have something to show, and I'll do that far and wide. Although I considered it, it didn't seem useful to send out a hey, still working update in the meantime. Partly because there's not a great venue for it, and partly because the subsequent roiling of the waters takes up time and energy I'd rather see productively used. But mainly because it's hard to do that without throwing under the bus whatever person or group is currently the bottleneck. And not only is that unfair, but it's terrible for both morale and productivity, so it seemed like waiting for a labs update was the best option. I'm open to suggestions, though, so definitely drop me a line (perhaps off list?) if you want to discuss something. William ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 02/28/2010 08:43 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 28 February 2010 20:24, William Pietriwill...@scissor.com wrote: Menacing people like that with consequences mainly serves to destroy motivation, not create it, so if you're truly interested in getting this done, I ask you not to do that again. Nobody has done any menacing. He asked what the consequences would be, he didn't threaten consequences. (That there will be consequences if you don't do your job should go without saying. Those consequences will come from your boss, not the community, though.) Well, in my experience, when somebody starts out with what the fuck and ends up talking about consequences, it is rarely a purely academic inquiry into organizational practices. But if I read it wrong, I'd be glad to apologize. I think the people working on this (Aaron and Howie in particular) are both talented and hardworking, so I feel protective of them. I'd like them to spend a long time working for the Wikimedia Foundation, and anything that might push against that is going to rile me up some. William ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 02/28/2010 08:59 PM, MZMcBride wrote: I finally figured out that the view history button in Pivotal Tracker is where all the relevant details are. For each of the items I'm looking at, Aaron appears to have completed them 2 months ago. But they're not marked as finished because you and Howie haven't done so? What's the hold-up exactly? Sorry, I thought I explained this earlier: deploying to somewhere that people can see is the current holdup. I believe that something isn't actually done until it's has been tested in an environment sufficiently like production that you have reasonable confidence that it will work. My point is that drama will slow things down, not speed things up. My long experience is that people swearing at programmers impedes progress. You should decide which you're after. I figure it's progress, which is why I mentioned it. Are you a programmer? The programmers seem to be the ones who have done their jobs here. This isn't a development issue by the looks of it, it's a management issue. And I'm swearing at the management (see e-mail subject line). I have not noticed that swearing at other people noticeably improves their performance either, but I am specifically concerned that the team members will be affected by your tone, whether or not you mean it for any specific individual. If you'd like to swear at me specifically, fine, whatever, but please do it off list. In public, and specifically when people who are working hard might take it amiss, I ask you to speak politely and professionally. Team morale is important to team productivity. I watch a live feed of every edit and action to the FlaggedRevisions labs sitehttp://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org and I've been the one doing the admin promotions on there since September 2009. Can you point to where you're seeing this feedback you're talking about? Off the top of my head, direct email, plus these pages: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Bug_reports_and_enhancement_requests http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page Plus various direct communication from Erik when I joined the project about the current state of things. And whatever else Howie dug up as he looked into improving the interfaces. The usability team and I agreed with that, as did others, which is what motivated this latest round of changes. Where are the comments from the Usability team? We get together and talk. In the WMF office, mainly. It's faster. Who exactly is working on these user interface issues? What are they doing? I'm curious. Howie, Aaron, and Parul all worked on that. The visual design is done and, I believe, implemented. There are some language changes going on now. And shouldn't I be able to see all of this Usability work at your Pivotal Tracker? I don't. No. The only thing we care about in the end is delivered software, so that's all Pivotal Tracker tracks. Upstream artifacts are tracked via email and verbally. As soon as we can release to labs and check out the new stuff, which I ardently hope is soon, we'll have some useful data on productivity. You ardently hope? Aren't you the person in charge of this project? Sort of. Project manager means I'm responsible for pushing it through, not that I'm particularly in charge of it. In my view, the community's ultimately in charge. I expected things to be released before this point, and indeed I previously expected to be able to release on the current Labs site without issue. Having been surprised before, I hope but do not yet plan that I won't be surprised again. I could make up dates, or I could press other people to make up dates and give them to you, but I believe that to be the sort of BS project management that gets a lot of perfectly fine projects into needles hot water. When I have enough data to give everybody a date I have some confidence in, I'll do it. But given that speed is the primary driver here, I'm not going to increase the workload of already busy people, thereby delaying the project, just to create dates whose value is questionable. Unlike the impediments you've been throwing up in this thread and that others have been throwing up over the past months and years? Originally it was getting the software mostly finished. That happened, and Erik announced that any project could request FlaggedRevisions. Then it became an issue of user interface (and oh-my-god usability). Then a hardware issue (though that turned out to be mostly, if not completely, bunk). I wonder what the next boogeyman will be. Perhaps http://bit.ly/djkLDa ? I don't appreciate the implication that I'm somehow trying to block this project, or that there's some grand conspiracy to block it. I want to get it done. Everybody involved wants to get it done. None of us benefits by not getting it done. If, as seems likely, there are some further
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:59 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: High-profile, high-priority? This has been in development for years and years and still isn't finished. What on Earth happens to the low priorities? They get done before anyone comes up with a reason to delay them :). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 02/28/2010 09:27 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 28 February 2010 21:05, William Pietriwill...@scissor.com wrote: As to who I'm responsible to, that was Erik Moeller and is becoming Danese Cooper. We of course have a plan, which is publicly posted, and which I'm glad to answer questions on. Elsewhere in this thread (and in the blog post) I've explained why I haven't just made up an arbitrary deadline, but am instead trying to measure productivity and project a date. If you have further questions on this, let me know. You've been working on it for months. Surely you and your team have produced something in that time. Look at how much it is, compare it to how much you think needs to be done (working out what needed to be done was the first thing you did, yes?), do a bit of multiplication, and give us your projected finish date. You shouldn't be trying to measure productivity, you should just be measuring it. That's an entirely reasonable approach, but there are two wrinkles. One, I underestimated the difficulty of releasing to a production-like environment. And until we have done that, we can't tell the difference between the things we hope are done and the things that are actually done. I intend to only measure the latter; measuring the former as if they were done is chancy. I am pressing vigorously for us to be able to do that soon, but there's only so much pressing you can do without long-term harm. Two, most software projects are inevitably exploratory. The difference between what we think we need and what we actually ended up needing is often large. So I could project dates based on all of the needs that we have discovered, and then somebody in the community will look at the software and say, Hey, what about X? And X will be some entirely reasonable thing that it is now obvious that we need. So I think it's better to release early and often and be open about the fact that it won't be really done until everybody (or, y'know, enough of everybody) agrees that we're now really done, or at least feel comfortable projecting that we're done. But if you'd like to make your own projections, all the data for the development work is exportable from Pivotal Tracker. If I thought I could take that data, or any other data, and give people a real date, one that they could have confidence in, I would be ecstatic to do so. But I can't, and I won't just give a BS date to get everybody off my back. William ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:03 PM, William Pietri will...@scissor.comwrote: On 02/28/2010 08:59 PM, MZMcBride wrote: I finally figured out that the view history button in Pivotal Tracker is where all the relevant details are. For each of the items I'm looking at, Aaron appears to have completed them 2 months ago. But they're not marked as finished because you and Howie haven't done so? What's the hold-up exactly? Sorry, I thought I explained this earlier: deploying to somewhere that people can see is the current holdup. I believe that something isn't actually done until it's has been tested in an environment sufficiently like production that you have reasonable confidence that it will work. I run a mediawiki farm with mediawiki trunk installed. I've got the process of setting up new wikis scripted and can set one up in 30 seconds. If you just need a place to install a wiki you should be able to find one no problem. Also, WMF has a whack of servers. You should have absolutely no problem getting one in short order. Particularly for a high priority project. My 2 cents. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
William Pietri wrote: On 02/28/2010 08:59 PM, MZMcBride wrote: I watch a live feed of every edit and action to the FlaggedRevisions labs site http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org and I've been the one doing the admin promotions on there since September 2009. Can you point to where you're seeing this feedback you're talking about? Off the top of my head, direct email, plus these pages: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Bug_reports_and_enhanceme nt_requests http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page Did you, uh, happen to click those links? In the first link, the page hasn't been edited since December 2009. The second link is almost exclusively various users asking for adminship and me responding to them. When you said the community doesn't yet believe the software is ready, at least judging by the last round of feedback on the labs site, I figured there might have been something substantive (and recent) you were basing these comments on. Silly me. We get together and talk. In the WMF office, mainly. It's faster. And it obliterates any possibility for a paper trail or accountability when deadlines are missed. Though in a George W. Bush-esque style, apparently no deadlines are being set. It's an interesting thought experiment if you extend this don't set a deadline for projects model: that multi-million dollar blockbuster? Due in theaters sometime, maybe. Who exactly is working on these user interface issues? What are they doing? I'm curious. Howie, Aaron, and Parul all worked on that. The visual design is done and, I believe, implemented. There are some language changes going on now. Got links? Nearly all Wikimedia-related software development has been publicly visible since the beginning. If there's software, language, or usability work being done, where are the links? You ardently hope? Aren't you the person in charge of this project? Sort of. Project manager means I'm responsible for pushing it through, not that I'm particularly in charge of it. In my view, the community's ultimately in charge. This is a joke, right? This is subtle humor? When I have enough data to give everybody a date I have some confidence in, I'll do it. But given that speed is the primary driver here, I'm not going to increase the workload of already busy people, thereby delaying the project, just to create dates whose value is questionable. Speed is the primary driver here? I think you're just trolling now. I don't appreciate the implication that I'm somehow trying to block this project, or that there's some grand conspiracy to block it. I want to get it done. Everybody involved wants to get it done. None of us benefits by not getting it done. Honest-to-God, nobody is asking that you put a man on the moon. It's some PHP that's conveniently already been written. Enable the damn extension, already. [I've omitted the pseudo-Kumbaya, we don't have any money or resources, look at Twitter! bullshit. It's not worth a proper reply.] MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 2:16 PM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: Rob Halsell has recycled an old server for our use, and we are working to get it configured in a way that's enough like the production environment that we will have some confidence that a successful test there will mean a successful rollout on the English Wikipedia. Unfortunately, the production environment is complicated, and Rob has a lot on his plate, probably too much, so this is taking a while. So to clarify, what is currently holding the project up is this old server (presumably recycled from production usage), that is sitting around waiting to be configured like a production server for testing? -- Stephen Bain stephen.b...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 02/28/2010 10:24 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 28 February 2010 22:17, Brian J Mingusbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I run a mediawiki farm with mediawiki trunk installed. I've got the process of setting up new wikis scripted and can set one up in 30 seconds. If you just need a place to install a wiki you should be able to find one no problem. Also, WMF has a whack of servers. You should have absolutely no problem getting one in short order. Particularly for a high priority project. My 2 cents. The problem isn't getting a wiki running, it's getting a wiki running in a way comparable to English Wikipedia, which is far from a default Mediawiki install. Given that these are the people that actually keep the enwiki servers running, I wouldn't expect it to take them this long, though... Yes. I was also expecting it to be easy. Heck, we had flaggedrevs.labs up already, so how hard could an update be? Which is why in the blog post I was sunny about having something visible soon. But for abstruse reasons, not all of which I understand personally, it turned out that it was not easy. It sounds like the reasons are mainly historical, though. Regardless, I have full faith that the people keeping the servers running are prioritizing this work highly, although -- correctly -- not as highly as keeping the existing stuff from blowing up. I really want FlaggedRevs deployed on enwiki, but I also want there to be an enwiki to deploy to. Sleep beckons, so I'm going to give up on this thread for the night, and the next couple of days are heavily booked. But if people have more questions, please do post them; if nobody else gets to them first, I will. And in the future people want to know about something, just drop me a note off list and say, Hey, William! I was wondering about X, and I'd bet other people are too. I'm entirely happy to keep people apprised on pretty much anything, but I don't want to gratuitously spam the inboxes of the eight zillion busy people on these lists until I have something useful to announce. William ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:24 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: On 28 February 2010 22:17, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I run a mediawiki farm with mediawiki trunk installed. I've got the process of setting up new wikis scripted and can set one up in 30 seconds. If you just need a place to install a wiki you should be able to find one no problem. Also, WMF has a whack of servers. You should have absolutely no problem getting one in short order. Particularly for a high priority project. My 2 cents. The problem isn't getting a wiki running, it's getting a wiki running in a way comparable to English Wikipedia, which is far from a default Mediawiki install. Given that these are the people that actually keep the enwiki servers running, I wouldn't expect it to take them this long, though... Setting up cur en has been surprisingly easy in the past, particularly with the advent of that fast C-mysql dump importer. And many people can afford those cheap dell quad core nehalem i7 cpus desktops. But honestly I don't see why it can't just be thrown up on any old apache by an experienced wmf admin in a matter of minutes, using the live data but not attached to squid, memcached etc.. Honestly, how much load are we going to subject this thing to right away? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:57 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:24 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: On 28 February 2010 22:17, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I run a mediawiki farm with mediawiki trunk installed. I've got the process of setting up new wikis scripted and can set one up in 30 seconds. If you just need a place to install a wiki you should be able to find one no problem. Also, WMF has a whack of servers. You should have absolutely no problem getting one in short order. Particularly for a high priority project. My 2 cents. The problem isn't getting a wiki running, it's getting a wiki running in a way comparable to English Wikipedia, which is far from a default Mediawiki install. Given that these are the people that actually keep the enwiki servers running, I wouldn't expect it to take them this long, though... Setting up cur en has been surprisingly easy in the past, particularly with the advent of that fast C-mysql dump importer. And many people can afford those cheap dell quad core nehalem i7 cpus desktops. But honestly I don't see why it can't just be thrown up on any old apache by an experienced wmf admin in a matter of minutes, using the live data but not attached to squid, memcached etc.. Honestly, how much load are we going to subject this thing to right away? I should add - if the Toolserver is still replicating mysql that would be the perfect place for this. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 28 February 2010 23:26, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: It's a simple question: what the fuck is the hold-up for FlaggedRevisions on the English Wikipedia? Thanks, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com Technically I think since about Feb 4th the answer is that Danese Cooper hasn't made it happen. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
