Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features

2012-04-29 Thread Jan Kučera
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

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 --
 Oliver Keyes
 Community Liaison, Product Development
 Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features

2012-04-29 Thread Brandon Harris

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


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[Wikimedia-l] Contribute box on wikimediafoundation.org

2012-04-29 Thread MZMcBride
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



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Contribute box on wikimediafoundation.org

2012-04-29 Thread Risker
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
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