On 09/02/2014 02:52 AM, Yann Forget wrote: > OK, I could buy that [fixing image pages]. But then why not > fixing that *first*, so that > any MV implementation coming afterwards would be smooth?
In the best of worlds, that would have been ideal. Now, no doubt I'm going to be branded a cynic for this, but have you ever /tried/ to standardize something on a project? Obviously, my frame of reference is the English Wikipedia and not Commons; but in a world where there exists at least six distinct templates whose primary function is to transclude a single "<references/>" onto a page and where any attempt to standardize to one of them unfailingly results in edit wars, that doesn't seem like a plausible scenario. Perhaps the problem is more fundamental than this, and we're only seeing symptoms. I don't know. But I /do/ know that waiting until every edge case is handled before deploying (attempted) improvements to the site is doomed to failure. If only because most of the edge case won't even be /findable/ until the software is in place so that it can't work even in principle. IMO, in practice, "get it working for the general case and most of the obvious edge cases" is a reasonable standard; and I'm pretty sure that MV qualified under that metric (and VE didn't). I suppose much of my frustration over the MV keruffle is borne out of a reaction I see much too often for my taste: editors yelling "OMG, look, image X isn't properly attributed/licensed/etc in MV! Burn it with fire!!!" rather than figuring out why X's image page isn't properly parsed and /fixing/ it (and possibly an underlying template that could fix dozen/hundred others in one fell swoop).I'm pretty sure that if half as much effort had been spent fixing issues as was attempting to kill MV, its fail rate would already be at "statistical anomaly" levels. .. but my inner cynic is also pretty sure that many of the loudest voices wanting to get rid of MV ostensibly because of its failings don't actually /want/ those failings to be fixed because being able to say "It's broken" rather than "I don't like it" sounds much more rational. -- Marc _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
