Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] New Code of Conduct committee candidates

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

Welcome and thank you for serving/having served in such an important role !

DJ

On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 11:39 AM Amir Sarabadani 
wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> The deadline for the public feedback was yesterday. Some objections have
> raised but committee decided not to change the structure of committee and
> its candidates. It means the new committee with the given members starts
> serving as of today until 19 June 2020.
>
> Please join me on thanking Nuria and Rosalie for their service and welcome
> Tonina and MusikAnimal to the main members of the committee.
>
> Best
>
> On Wed, May 8, 2019 at 9:13 PM Amir Sarabadani 
> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> > The committee has finished selecting new members and the new committee
> > candidates are (In alphabetical order):
> >
> >- Amir Sarabadani
> >- Lucie-Aimée Kaffee
> >- MusikAnimal
> >- Tonina Zhelyazkova
> >- Tony Thomas
> >
> > And auxiliary members will be (In alphabetical order):
> >
> >- Huji
> >- Matanya
> >- Nuria Ruiz
> >- Rosalie Perside
> >- Tpt
> >
> > You can read more about the members in [0]
> >
> > The changes are:
> > * Nuria and Rosalie are moving from main member to auxilary members
> > * MusikAnimal is moving from auxilary member to main
> > * Tonina Zhelyazkova is joining the main members
> >
> > This is not the final structure. According to the CoC [1], the current
> > committee publishes the new members and call for public feedback for *six
> > weeks* and after that, the current committtee might apply changes to the
> > structure based on public feedback.
> >
> > Please let the committee know if you have any concern regarding the
> > members and its structure until *19 June 2019* and after that, the new
> > committee will be in effect and will serve for a year.
> >
> > [0]:
> >
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee/Members/Candidates
> > [1]:
> >
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee#Selection_of_new_members
> >
> > Amir, On behalf of the Code of Conduct committee
> > Best
> >
> >
>
> --
> Amir (he/him)
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [discovery] Interactive Team putting work on pause

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

> Hi all,
> The Interactive Team in Discovery is in the process of putting its work on
> pause. The team's aim during this period is to get its work to a stable and
> maintainable state.
> Currently, work on new features is on hold. It is not yet known what the
> timeline is for this transition to a paused state, or whether there will be
> further deployments of features that have already been completed. I will
> update this list when there is more information.
> Thanks,
> Dan
> --
> Dan Garry
> Lead Product Manager, Discovery
> Wikimedia Foundation


So it seems all work on Maps, Graphs and other interactive features is
going to be halted pretty soon. I was directed at this notification after a
Maps ticket mentioned:

With the team winding down


To which I asked:

> Why is the team winding down ?


To which Dan Garry responded:

> There were expectations that were set regarding things such as team goals,
> working collaboratively with stakeholders, and advance notice to
> communities, that were repeatedly not met by the team.


And he pointed me to this discovery mailing list announcement, which well
isn't really an explanation as much as a statement on the effect that
'winding down' will have.

My interpretation of the information up to here was: "we are dissolving
this team because it didn't perform and by posting to discovery mailing
list we did the minimal effort required to notify people, but lets hope
nobody notices what the notification really means"
At the same time Dan's words are a rather hefty review on the performance
of a team, which I'm not used to seeing from WMF. Refreshing, but unusual.

This annoys me and I answer:

> 1: I'd expect this to be announced on wikimedia-l, if we start a team we
> always seem more than anxious to do so.
> 2: I'd like some details. I thought we had left behind all the "let's try
> and hide this and hope no one notices it"-shit in 2016.
> 3: Thank you team ! You did some great work, and it was more productive
> and groundbreaking than many other teams have been able to do in 5 years.


A bit hyperbolic on all fronts, I admit.

To which Dan responds with:

> I am not the person who made this decision. I do not know all of the
> reasons it was made. The person who made the decision is on vacation for
> the next few weeks. I am trying my best to communicate as much as I can in
> her absence, which is why I made a public announcement of all that I know
> now rather than waiting weeks for my manager to return. I am afraid that
> some patience is required until Katie gets back from vacation.


So now Dan doesn't know enough to be able to discuss this, even though he
gave a rather destructive team review earlier.

1: This is exactly the kind of communication that 'the community' keeps
complaining about. Reactive instead of proactive. Evasive instead of
transparent. Now volunteers need to spend time to figure out what is
happening here ? This has cost me over 3 hours today. I would have liked to
have spent that time differently.
2: It shouldn't matter that Katie is on holidays, I'd assume/hope someone
takes over her duties while she is away (Likely Dan himself and/or Wes
Moran). Providing information on topics like this shouldn't have to wait
until someone returns from a (likely well deserved) holiday.
3: Why do I have to write this email ? It's really not that hard: Make a
decision, explain it.

DJ
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063225.html

I just found back this post by David Gerard from 2010 and was struck by how
dead-on the discussion and analysis was and how far we have actually come
with VE 5 years later, even though we still did not pass the finish line
just yet.

Also interesting is some of the follow up to it, which points out that the
usability of Templates is also a real problem in itself, not easily
solvable with WYSIWYG, but probably just as important.

I think VE is really close now to being usable in production, but I think
that we are FAR from done on this front. Like was stated, templates are a
real problem. A UI problem, and one that VE doesn't really solve. Citoid
sort of does, but just for one small subset of templates.

I think it is important to remember that VE is a framework. The piece that
will open up other possibilities, but that we will need to still do a lot
of work to find what those possibilities are, how they can make page and
article authoring more usable etc...

The post starts with a quote of Fred Bauder: "There has to be a vision
though"

So I'm asking: What is the vision for this next step ?
- What ideas do people have with regard to usability and templates.
- What examples of good editors can we find that also deal with
templates/objects etc.
- What are our unique challenges ?
- What kind of research and development would be needed to deliver this ?

I would love it if we could end up with a discussion and summary as we had
back then. A guide for us towards solving this next problem within another
5 years. We and the WMF can probably not start on this tomorrow, but we can
start thinking about it.

DJ
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's cool?

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

> On 6 jun. 2015, at 17:25, Quim Gil  wrote:
> 
> Hi, just in case you have missed this thread in Wikimedia where I mentioned 
> you, and now SJ asks.
> 
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Sam Klein mailto:sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu>>
> Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:26 AM
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's cool?
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List  >
> 
> 
> Quim writes:
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96378 
> >   (33 hackathon events)
> > Experiment with video.js was basically a one-person-three-day [TheDJ
> special]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100106 
> 
> 
> Very neat.  Does this work with popcorn?

I guess with popcorn, you mean popcornjs.org . In that 
case, no, it works with https://videojs.com 
The point was to show how easy it would be to replace what we have now, with 
something better and I just wanted to get something of the ground and 
demonstrable.

I picked the most popular/active github project, and that seems to be 
videojs.com  at this moment in time. I did also consider 
popcornjs actually, but it seems more an experiment with temporal events, then 
focusing on being a good extensible player that everyone wants to use (no 
offense to that team, but that was the first impression).

Anyway, both of them would still require significant time to get it to 
production. But both of them will be easier to maintain than (fixing) what we 
have right now.

Ideally, I think we will want to make sure that players can be used 
interchangeably, just based on the the information in the DOM. I’m looking at 
defining some extensions hooks, so that we can decouple players from the 
TimedMediaHandler extension.

And we will need brion’s ogv.js https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/ 
 work to support browsers without 
OGV/WebM support.

DJ


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