On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 1:45 PM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > As a huge VE advocate, I was quite disconcerted how hard the WMF was > trying to force through what was clearly an early beta in need of > real-world testing as if it were a production-ready product; I think > this was the problem and the reason for the backlash. VE *now* has had > a couple of years' development in a real-world environment and is > really quite excellent (and the only sensible way to edit tables). But > the problem here was not fear of change or fear of technology, but > rejecting technology that was being forced on editors when it was > really obviously not up to the job as yet. > > > - d. > This. David and Risker say it well. From my position, as the guy responsible for the team that was worried about the non-technical aspects of the rollout, I think I'm safe in saying that the root cause was a lack of a clearly articulated minimum viable product. From the WMF developers' POV, "Hey! it does half of what you need!" was a pretty substantial win at the time. From the POV of a random editor, "Hey! it only does //half// of what I need" was pretty damning criticism. I own part of the blame for that rollout. I wish I'd pushed back harder. In my own defense, the team that had to articulate these changes and manage the social roll out (which formed the corpus of the Community Engagement (Product) team today) was hired about 11 minutes before the roll-out. We didn't have much of a chance to have direct influence. And I don't think we really knew how many editing errors would be introduced - I don't think that anyone expected that, and until we got it up to scale, we wouldn't have seen that, necessarily. The real flaw was the failure to agree with the editing community on what the minimum viable product was. I'm pleased to say that the WMF learned a lot from that experience, and by the time I left, we had moved on to making a whole new set of mistakes.... But yeah, what David and Risker said. pb > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> > -- Philippe Beaudette [email protected] 415-275-1424 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
