While I don't agree with the negative sentiment around experimentation, I think there's value both in MZMcBride's op-ed, and in the comment thread that follows. He correctly calls out some of our long term organizational failings around product planning, resource allocation, execution, and follow-thru. It's almost as painful to read about LiquidThreads as it is to use talk pages today, eight years after the LT project was first proposed. Are we learning from our failures?
The criticism around AFTv5 in terms of product design (nevermind the code) is largely echoed in the comments, yet we seem rather sure that we're giving editors a tool of importance. My daily sampling of what's flowing into the enwiki db from the feature appears to be 99% garbage, with the onus being on volunteers to sort the wheat from the chaff. If we had a dead simple, highly function, and well designed discussion system (see LiquidThreads), wouldn't that be the ideal route for "high value" feedback from knowledgeable non-editors instead of an anonymous one-way text box at the bottom of the articles that's guaranteed to be a garbage collector? The one thing the op-ed seems to miss is that one of the main goals of the foundation is to attract new editors and improve the editing experience. I think development in that direction (visual editor with a new parser especially) is hugely promising but we also need to remain cognizant of the needs of our community, take care in allocating resources, and integrate feedback lest our efforts mistakenly contribute to our retention problem. On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Tyler Romeo <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey, > > Not sure if anybody has seen this article yet: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-08-20/Op-ed > > Thought it was interesting and possibly worth discussion. > > --Tyler Romeo > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
