Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
Hi Oliver, the development progress definitely is very very slow. As a comparison, did you watch how the web front-end of Facebook changes within the last year? It was completely overhauled about three times... You may object Facebook is commercial and not comparable to Wikimedia, but this basically is not true at all sice BOTH sites compete for the same users (editors in case of Wikimedia). I know that comparison to any other commercial site is not welcome here, but that is a sad point people in the community still think commercial/noncomemrcial are two different worlds - they arent. There is only one user, who actually does not care a lot about a site being commercial/uncommercial... There is only one market, so Wikimedia has to behave much like the commercial sites (of course with little specifics to a non-profit like privacy etc.). From the point of this comparison, there is almost no development to MediaWiki... this is very sad, from a multi-million budget we only have few feauter engineers... :((( The software is a significant part of the whole site and community, if you have bad software you will never have great content... Features engineers should be the core of all Wikimedia staff, it is pitty to see the reality is exactly the other way round... The example can be myself - I am missing chart features withint MediaWiki/Wikipedia, I filled a bug, nothing happens, I may leave the community for good... This is the same story over and over again. Foundation did not really care till now... Kozuch 2012/4/29 Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org: Jan; we get new features fairly regularly :). At the moment we're working on two new pieces of software - the Article Feedback Form, v5, and New Page Triage (a replacement for Special:NewPages). After that we're moving on to a proper notifications system to allow better communication and participation across wikis. I appreciate the rate of progress may seem slow; it is worth pointing out we have a very small teem of features engineers (although more are being hired!) and so are limited in how many different things we can work on at once. On 25 April 2012 19:50, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, yes, there surely were comments from developers... that is positive. But the result as general is still nothing at all (the feature is not even nearing deployment). WMF should invest in new features. I am not a dev and thus can not contribute any code. Kozuch 2012/4/25 Sumana Harihareswara suma...@wikimedia.org: On 04/23/2012 01:03 PM, Jan Ku?era wrote: Hi there, If, on the other hand, you just mean features to promote greater communication and networking between editors, that's a clear priority - I'm happy to talk to people about the work we're doing, and to hear any suggestions along the way :). yes I exactly meant that. It is about making contributing not suck. How often does Wikipedia (=MediaWiki) get big new features??? I posted a bug about integrating some kind of graph/chart feature (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29806) and in 9 months almost nothing happened... and this really sucks... beleive it or not... Kozuch Hi, Kozuch. I look at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29806 and I see that, within a day of the issue being filed, multiple experienced MediaWiki developers commented on that issue to explain what the chart software's developers would have to do in order to make it suitable for use on our sites. I've also contacted the author of that extension to point at that bug's comments and at this procedural guide: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_an_extension_for_deployment so if you could help me in alerting the extension's author to those comments, that would be great. Thanks! -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
On Apr 29, 2012, at 1:04 AM, Jan Kučera wrote: Hi Oliver, the development progress definitely is very very slow. As a comparison, did you watch how the web front-end of Facebook changes within the last year? It was completely overhauled about three times... You may object Facebook is commercial and not comparable to Wikimedia, but this basically is not true at all sice BOTH sites compete for the same users (editors in case of Wikimedia). I know that comparison to any other commercial site is not welcome here, but that is a sad point people in the community still think commercial/noncomemrcial are two different worlds - they arent. There is only one user, who actually does not care a lot about a site being commercial/uncommercial... There is only one market, so Wikimedia has to behave much like the commercial sites (of course with little specifics to a non-profit like privacy etc.) You are comparing apples and oranges. Facebook: * Has *hundreds of millions* of dollars to devote to developer staff; * Does *not* have a community that demands to be consulted for every change; * Does *not* require that features work in ancient browsers; * Does *not* have to support skins and other technology built ten years ago; * Does *not* have to develop in order to support non-Facebook installs of their software; * Has *only* about 100 languages to develop for; * Pays *above* market rate From the point of this comparison, there is almost no development to MediaWiki... this is very sad, from a multi-million budget we only have few feauter engineers... :((( The software is a significant part of the whole site and community, if you have bad software you will never have great content... Features engineers should be the core of all Wikimedia staff, it is pitty to see the reality is exactly the other way round.. I'm not sure I agree with you that Features Engineers should be the core of the Foundation's staff but that's not really relevant. There are two major constraints that I think need to be understood. First, the multi-million budget we have is actually *nothing* by the standards of sites and tech systems that are 1/20th of our size and scale. Bear in mind that features engineering only receives a fraction of the 30 million (or whatever) each year. (For comparison, a friend of mine runs a moderate-sized e-commerce site. Her budget, per year, is $300 million dollars. They get probably 1/100th of our traffic and users. Probably less.) Second, and this is going to make people surly, but the we don't pay crap. Our salaries are the lowest of the low. It is close to impossible to attract experienced talent when you are offering 80% of market rate. So even if we decided to put ALL the budget into hiring software engineers, it wouldn't mean anything because we still couldn't hire those people. The example can be myself - I am missing chart features withint MediaWiki/Wikipedia, I filled a bug, nothing happens, I may leave the community for good... This is the same story over and over again. Foundation did not really care till now... This is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. If you feel strongly about this, you should lobby more and more people, and create a greater consensus that your chart software is important to everyone and should be elevated. Leaving the community isn't the solution: you miss 100% of the balls you don't take a swing at. --- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Contribute box on wikimediafoundation.org
Hi. A few months ago I created Template:Contribute at wikimediafoundation.org.[1] It displays above the edit window whenever a logged out user presses the Contribute (previously Edit) tab. There were some concerns that this message was still too obscure, so I've now implemented a namespace notice via a MediaWiki gadget. When viewing any page in the Talk namespace, you'll now see the contents of Template:Contribute below the page title. The relevant code can be found here.[2] MZMcBride [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:Contribute [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-NamespaceNotice.js ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Contribute box on wikimediafoundation.org
On 29 April 2012 22:53, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Hi. A few months ago I created Template:Contribute at wikimediafoundation.org.[1] It displays above the edit window whenever a logged out user presses the Contribute (previously Edit) tab. There were some concerns that this message was still too obscure, so I've now implemented a namespace notice via a MediaWiki gadget. When viewing any page in the Talk namespace, you'll now see the contents of Template:Contribute below the page title. The relevant code can be found here.[2] MZMcBride [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:Contribute [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-NamespaceNotice.js MZM, do you think you could make it more clear where exactly the links go to? It's not clear that it is taking the user to another project where his message will be publicly accessible. I am familiar with one case where someone clicked on one of those links, expecting that his message would go directly to the WMF and not be publicly available on Meta. While there's something to be said for users having to be net-savvy, I think we're all just a little too used to open discussion on public forums, where there's no telling who might decide to respond and put their two cents in. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l