Hello Dan! I only described what some reactions were. It has an origin, the background: For some years people on nl-wiki have been very enthusiastic about the idea of a Visual Editor, the community liked it very much and wanted it very much. When the Visual Editor came live on the Dutch Wikipedia, users were very enthusiastic about it and wanted to try it, but very soon after bugs after bugs after bugs after bugs appeared. On request of the team of the Visual Editor we had before the deployment already a feedback page, it is still loaded with bugs, all reported to the team, but still none have been fixed. The Visual Editor makes a really mess of too many pages. The developers of VE planned some time later to deploy the next step of the Visual Editor and making the VE not opt-in but the standard editor for everyone. Besides having promised an opt-out, which other projects did not get and the trust in the VE team was harmed a lot, almost all the bugs that we have reported are still not fixed, even just before the scheduled deployment. The Dutch community got much demotivated and lost even more trust because of this and held a voting about this situation which made clear that the existing VE was absolutely not ready to be made available for everyone, and that on a project were people would welcome a good Visual Editor very very much. This was a huge disappointment. What this disappointment made even worse was that the bugs weren't fixed, and the community got some kind of car salesman from WMF which tried to sell a broken product, which annoyed even more and gave the feeling the community is the idiot, while with the feedback which was given nobody has done anything. The Dutch community is used to changes and some normal annoyance that they have to change habits or fix broken things again and again, but the situation with VE is considered the worst implementation ever on Wikipedia of the past decade. It gave users the feeling that WMF doesn't care for the needs of users who daily do the actual work which makes Wikipedia a success, gave the feeling that WMF things that sticking to a plan is more important than really solving the issues the local users met, and made users feel WMF/developers as unreliable and untrustworthy. This is still in peoples minds after months like a nightmare and still is frustrating.
Earlier this year the community of nl-wiki adopted very quick Wikidata as new way of working and also the Notifications tool (Flow) was adopted rapidly with much excitement in September (even while both are not the most optimal and still have bugs). So yes, it is illogical that some users want the VE first ready, but that is the result of a long desired wish to have a fully working VE which apparently is considered a larger need than a better search. I constantly keep trying to inform the community about why, how, when, etc to get a better picture of technical changes. Lucky most users understand that both pieces of software are independent of each other and really like to move on and have the software improved, including the search. Romaine --- tech ambassador for nl-wiki Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:21:50 +0000 From: Dan Garry <[email protected]> To: "Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Would any other wikis like to try out a new search? Message-ID: <caow03me9f_51duxq0qy1zijhrlkqfcocwmsc7zp8d58ge9-...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" It's a little illogical to say no to search on the basis that VE should be fixed first. The engineers involved in search are not involved in VE at all, and saying no to search does not mean that they'll be reassigned to the VE instead. Alas, people can be illogical sometimes. Thanks very much for relaying the results of the straw poll you ran, Romaine! Dan On 27 October 2013 00:27, Romaine Wiki <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Nik, > > About a week ago I explained the nl-wikipedia community on the central > discussion page about your message and asked them the question. > The result of the short poll is 19 users say yes to test, 4 say no, 2 say > neutral. > In general they experience the current search limited and would like to > see it improved. 2 of who say no have no problems with the current search > and say that something does not need to be fixed if it isn't broken, while > the visual editor should be fixed first as that one is broken much more on > nl-wiki (yes the VE is a huge problem with messing up pages, but that is > another subject). Apparently those two do not have the experience that the > search is limited. Two others say no as they have had worse experiences > with the visual editor (just as everyone else on nl-wiki: we had a poll on > VE which clearly stated that the VE was absolutely working worse and hit a > big gap in the trust in the developers), and would like to be assured that > the new search isn't having too big bugs that disrupt searching normally. > > In general saying there is a large majority for testing. Certainly for > secondary testing at first, if it is stable enough also for testing in > primary modus. > > Romaine > > --- > tech ambassador for nl-wiki > > > [Wikitech-ambassadors] Would any other wikis like to try out a new search? > Nikolas Everett neverett at wikimedia.org > Thu Oct 17 19:49:08 UTC 2013 > > Dear Ambassadors, > > I'm looking for volunteer wikis to try out the new search that Chad and > I've been working on called CirrusSearch. > > <sales pitch>Be a part of the second wave of wikis and influence new search > features!</sales pitch> > > Reality: > * We're reasonably sure CirrusSearch's language support is better than the > current search. [1] > * CirrusSearch indexes expanded templates. > * CirrusSearch indexes articles within a few seconds of when they are > changed. Articles that contain a changed template take longer but they are > also updated. > * Most of the special search syntax is the same. You can read the syntax > here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search/CirrusSearchFeatures > > What it means to volunteer: > If you volunteer your wiki we'll turn CirrusSearch on in "secondary" mode > where it'll keep itself up to date but all queries will still go through > the old search. You'll be able to get search results from the new search > engine for comparison by adding a url parameter to the search results > page. If you and the community that you represent aren't immediately blown > away by how much better it works we'll work with you to make it awesome. > > At some point, shortly after the new search has been deemed awesome, we'll > switch CirrusSearch to "primary" mode and all queries will go through it. > You'll be able to get at the old search results with a url parameter > similar to the one that you used to test CirrusSearch. If anything goes > wrong we'll switch you back to the old search. We'll keep that option open > for a few months. > > So who is ready to help make search better? > > Nik Everett > > [1]: Some languages (20ish) will see a huge improvement because > CirrusSearch understands their grammar and old search doesn't. Many other > languages will see an improvement because CirrusSearch is happy to search > all kinds of character sets while the current search isn't. Esperanto is > very well supported by the old search so would get worse. eo wikis should > probably wait until we've improved support. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors > -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform Wikimedia Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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