Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
2009/7/3 Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com:
{{qif}} was being used massively, even if the majority of the community
didn't know about it (or care). It supported their work and allowed them
to do the things with templates that they needed in articles. I would
argue these complex templates came from the community's needs.
Your last sentence is key here. Templates that present a (relatively)
simple interface but have complex plumbing to do cool things are
much-wanted and much-needed.
However, the ParserFunctions language sucks because it was made up as
it goes along and resembles nothing so much as an [[esoteric
programming language]]. A better language will make it easier to
program templates that do complex things with a simple interface.
- d.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
2009/7/6 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com:
2009/7/3 Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com:
{{qif}} was being used massively, even if the majority of the community
didn't know about it (or care). It supported their work and allowed them
to do the things with templates that they needed in articles. I would
argue these complex templates came from the community's needs.
Your last sentence is key here. Templates that present a (relatively)
simple interface but have complex plumbing to do cool things are
much-wanted and much-needed.
However, the ParserFunctions language sucks because it was made up as
it goes along and resembles nothing so much as an [[esoteric
programming language]]. A better language will make it easier to
program templates that do complex things with a simple interface.
Questionable. Since for fairly obvious reasons you can't let
wikipedians execute arbitrary code through templates there is always
going to be the problem of wikipedians useing workarounds that
generate problematical code.
--
geni
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
2009/7/6 geni geni...@gmail.com: Questionable. Since for fairly obvious reasons you can't let wikipedians execute arbitrary code through templates there is always going to be the problem of wikipedians useing workarounds that generate problematical code. ParserFunctions is already Turing-complete, so your first clause is factually inaccurate. The present workaround is to kill template computations that take too long. The problems are: (1) they're hard to program (2) they're hard to parse. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
2009/7/6 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: 2009/7/6 geni geni...@gmail.com: Questionable. Since for fairly obvious reasons you can't let wikipedians execute arbitrary code through templates there is always going to be the problem of wikipedians useing workarounds that generate problematical code. ParserFunctions is already Turing-complete, so your first clause is factually inaccurate. The present workaround is to kill template computations that take too long. The problems are: (1) they're hard to program (2) they're hard to parse. I know this. Take too long though isn't an option because you would hit issues with templates that only run some of the time. Current limits on templates are rather more complex. I would argue that arbitrary code by definition includes code with far more steps than than ParserFunctions allows. Getting back to the point attempts to highly optimize code to stay within whatever the new equivalent of [[Wikipedia:Template_limits]] would risk even a fairly clean language turning into something of a mess. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 10:29 AM, genigeni...@gmail.com wrote: snip Getting back to the point attempts to highly optimize code to stay within whatever the new equivalent of [[Wikipedia:Template_limits]] would risk even a fairly clean language turning into something of a mess. Any reasonable attempt at a clean language should reduce the coding complexity in the most common use cases compared to the current system. Yes, there will always be boundary cases that are likely to be complicated and hackish; however, I'd consider it a net benefit as long as the most common cases are made more legible and intelligible. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Sorry, where I said AbuseFilter I meant to say FlaggedRevisions. I'm not sure on how AbuseFilter came to be agreed on. On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Jennifer Riggs jri...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'm curious. In your perspective who is doing the central management that makes it difficult for ideas to percolate up? WMF, Jimmy, Board, select administrators/highly involved community members? In your opinion, is there an infrastructure barrier or a personalities one? jriggs It's an infrastructure, policy and outreach issue. I assume that every single person has the very best for the projects in mind and is doing it for the right reasons. That said, I see the definition of community being interpreted very narrowly. I liked what I saw with AbuseFilter but that was a singular case. Filtering edits is almost on the same level as showing advertisements. In these rare cases any change you try to make will quickly make its way through the community because many people will be outraged. There are a lot of other situations that don't propagate as well, not because they aren't very important, but because people just don't know about them. I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to come here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that agreement happened. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l On which wiki do you mean, for FlaggedRevs? For the English Wikipedia, my understanding is that consensus was reached in favor of a limited trial for FlaggedRevs three months ago, but it hasn't been enabled yet because the tech team is still tidying things up and checking that everything works http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-May/043187.html. This was not a matter of the Foundation consulting the community—the community petitioned the Foundation, from what I can tell. I realize that 324 people voting might not qualify as the community for you, but this is the way changes get made on the English Wikipedia: people debate for a while (an extremely long while, as the case may be), proposals get tossed around, and eventually consensus forms among the portion of editors that is active in policy discussions. This system is not ideal, but it's the system that's in place. If you want to call the validity of the English Wikipedia's decision-making processes into question, then do so, but I don't think you should frame the discussion as being about the Foundation or software changes. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Benjamin Lees emufarm...@gmail.comwrote: On which wiki do you mean, for FlaggedRevs? For the English Wikipedia, my understanding is that consensus was reached in favor of a limited trial for FlaggedRevs three months ago, but it hasn't been enabled yet because the tech team is still tidying things up and checking that everything works http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-May/043187.html. This was not a matter of the Foundation consulting the community—the community petitioned the Foundation, from what I can tell. i didn't know it happened that way. I thought that, quite some time ago, the Foundation paid a developer 20k to develop the extension, and then got community approval for at trial? Oh nevermind, I must be thinking of the ratings extension? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
-- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 16:09:00 +0100 From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus? To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: a4359dff0907020809g4cb248h2095752d36c6d...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 2009/7/2 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: As the projects have grown and as they have become more centrally managed in a top down fashion it has become increasingly difficult for ideas to percolate from the bottom up. I'm curious. In your perspective who is doing the central management that makes it difficult for ideas to percolate up? WMF, Jimmy, Board, select administrators/highly involved community members? In your opinion, is there an infrastructure barrier or a personalities one? jriggs ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
Sorry, where I said AbuseFilter I meant to say FlaggedRevisions. I'm not sure on how AbuseFilter came to be agreed on. On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Jennifer Riggs jri...@wikimedia.orgwrote: I'm curious. In your perspective who is doing the central management that makes it difficult for ideas to percolate up? WMF, Jimmy, Board, select administrators/highly involved community members? In your opinion, is there an infrastructure barrier or a personalities one? jriggs It's an infrastructure, policy and outreach issue. I assume that every single person has the very best for the projects in mind and is doing it for the right reasons. That said, I see the definition of community being interpreted very narrowly. I liked what I saw with AbuseFilter but that was a singular case. Filtering edits is almost on the same level as showing advertisements. In these rare cases any change you try to make will quickly make its way through the community because many people will be outraged. There are a lot of other situations that don't propagate as well, not because they aren't very important, but because people just don't know about them. I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to come here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that agreement happened. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
snip
I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any
discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a
major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are
stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to come
here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that agreement
happened.
The initial parser functions were a replacement for {{qif}} and kin.
The enwiki community had already adopted a significant degree of
programming in template space. But they did so in a half-assed way
that was bad for server load and template management, so bad in fact
that their approach was provoking arguments between the community and
the developers (see the enwiki history of WT:AUM circa 2006, for
example). The initial parser functions where created to answer that
demand in the community in a way that wouldn't cause the servers to
explode.
Hence the demand for programmatic templates came from the community
initially, the developers simply responded to that in a way that was
necessary to keep things working. (For the record, I'm referring to
the earliest history of ParserFunctions. I'm not sure about the
history of #expr and some of the later bits.)
-Robert Rohde
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
snip
I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any
discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a
major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are
stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to
come
here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that
agreement
happened.
The initial parser functions were a replacement for {{qif}} and kin.
The enwiki community had already adopted a significant degree of
programming in template space.
The developer that abused templates so that qif could be written does not
constitute a consensus. The conversations regarding programming on Wikipedia
were extremely limited given their impact.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:06 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote: (For the record, I'm referring to the earliest history of ParserFunctions. I'm not sure about the history of #expr and some of the later bits.) #expr was present since the first commit (r13505). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 8:32 PM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote: I'd be interested to see your positive, assume-good-faith list of suggestions. One of my favorite suggestions, from Erik, is that we use IdeaTorrent ( http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ ) in order to provide a single place for users to engage in very important discussions about all manner of issues relating to the community. Right now there is simply no way for our widely disparate community of users, who have expertise in every area imaginable and whose collective input is extremely valuable, to come together and have a conversation. It takes someone such as yourself to champion an idea to the community and present it in its best form and make sure that the best of the arguments from both sides are heard from users. As the projects have grown and as they have become more centrally managed in a top down fashion it has become increasingly difficult for ideas to percolate from the bottom up. How can a user with a great idea on one wiki present it and be sure that users from the other wikis and the WMF see it? Likewise, how can the Foundation ask questions of the *entire* community? Neither users or the Foundation have a voice that can reach everyone (fundraising and the like are an exception). There isn't a plausible conduit through which we can present and receive ideas and those ideas are considered on an equal basis with all other ideas and then refined and improved by the will of the community and ultimately implemented (by a volunteer or the WMF). Regarding the software, I think it's great to hold a conversation on wikitech-l about the best way to replace ParserFunctions. Of course, the way we got ParserFunctions was through a conversation on wikitech-l which entertained a few ideas but ultimately did not have the wider goals of the community in mind due to the narrow scope of the discussions. Usability and encyclopedia writing were not concerns, CPU cycles was. The justification was, and continues to be, well, there is obviously a problem here. Therefore we, the code writers, have free license to develop a new solution, ask our friends in IRC if it looks nice, and then put it on the live sites. It's not even clear how you could extract a consensus from wikitech-l if it were there. If you take fully consulting the community consensus seriously then there is a very different design model that then leads to development. In this method we have a plausible way of asking a large number of *editors and users* what is wrong with the software. You have to get many of the people who actually edit the encyclopedia a lot and have something to say about what's wrong with it and what's right with it in the same place fully engaged with each other. Right now we do not have tools that facilitate this. Article talk pages are simply not it. Meta is not it - the people aren't there. The mailing lists aren't it - the people aren't here. We represent a tiny minority of the community and a minority of the total number of people who would, if they were afforded the opportunity, have an opinion worth hearing. If you look at the number of people engaged in any conversation which will have a serious impact on all of the projects and then compare that number to any measure of active editors and contributors you will see that it is shockingly small. I encourage the WMF to make that ratio as large as possible, and I suggest that the larger you make it the more we will all benefit. I get the feeling that many people look at full consultation as a lot of really hard work. I think that's wrong - we are supposed to be leveraging the power of communities. The WMF has the power to enable a community to come together and form a consensus by bringing their attention all to the same place. I think that until something like that happens full consultation is more of a dream that many people aren't even trying to realize and changes will continue to be made to the software and otherwise which aren't really in the right direction. For example, it's not clear to everyone that Wikipedia even needs a programming language. I don't know if it does or not. There are a lot of things to take into consideration, such as usability, readability of the main article namespace, duplication of content, ease of more sophisticated editing, and issues you or I might not even think of! Adding a programming language is not a magic bullet to these issues. It could in fact be that templates and the way we work with article content in the first place needs to be entirely rethought. This is not a conversation that should be limited to wikitech-l. In fact, editors might have a more useful opinion. But in the current system their opinions won't be sought out as the decision to do it was entirely top down. Lastly, I do not consider a wide distaste for the look of ParserFunctions to be a sanction for a new programming language. ParserFunctions was added because a few users decided to abuse
