2013/4/8 Risker <[email protected]>: > Eran raises a key point. On his project, there was a significant > discussion prior to the deployment. Hewiki has voluntarily, as a community, > decided to participate in the early development of a tool. This is a very > good thing, and one that reflects well on the hewiki community.
Thanks for the compliment. A bit more detail: I heard about Wikidata quite early on (November 2011), because I follow mailing lists and conferences and I try to learn about new developments. As soon as I could, I asked Lydia if the hewiki can get it early. Lydia and Denny agreed, but, very interestingly, demanded to have detailed discussion on the wiki and get community. This was a very smart move on their behalf - I suppose that they learned from earlier bad communication blunders, so big kudos to them for that. I tested Wikidata early and fixed a few tiny bugs, and when I thought that it's ready to show to the community, I announced it in the village pump. I was prepared to answer questions, and when I didn't know what to say, I asked Lydia, who stepped in and answered everything in detail. After the questions phase ended, there was ZERO objection to joining early testing of Wikidata. Zero objection to a change is a very rare thing for hewiki :) Technical problems *were* uncovered after the deployment. Quite a lot of problems, actually. But the community was well prepared, and reported them in a mostly constructive way. There was general understanding that Wikidata migration will happen anyway, and that it's better to suffer through a few bugs than to just grumble. > English projects, particularly Wikipedia, do not have that same shared > cultural, geographic or historical cohesion; as the lingua franca of more > than a dozen countries, and the second language for thousands of other > editors, even localized variations in usage can be a stumbling block. Add > into that the fact that English Wikipedia has such a large editing > community, and that there is no effective centralized communication > process, and the ability of the community to develop a consensus opinion on > any major topic is exponentially more difficult than on many other > projects. I find SiteNotice and the notification area above the Watchlist very simple and effective communication tools. The latter is used now for the PageProtector RFC now, for example. Now that I think of it, I don't recall that it was used for announcements about Wikidata (although I might be wrong). It probably should have. On the other hand, it might have created stop energy without very good preparation. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
