I've been sitting back watching this thread as it has unfolded, as well as the discussions in a few other places, to better understand how this particular subset of the Wikimedia/Mediawiki community problem-solved. I'd like to share with you all a few observations.
Steven and Jon, consider having coffee with your colleague Siko Bouterse. Siko can tell you all about how to fail successfully. Yes, I know it's an oxymoron, but there are huge opportunities in trying something, having it fail, and deriving goodwill, experience and knowledge from that failure. You've got an amazing opportunity here to learn from a well-intentioned process that has had significant unanticipated negative effects. As best I can tell, nobody doubts that this project was undertaken in good faith, and nobody doubts that you and your team are disappointed that its outcome is not what was anticipated. There is a bit of amnesia about the fact that almost all editors are also readers and regular users of the projects we create, and those editors have been encouraged since Day One to inform developers of any technical problems with the site; they're the canaries in the coal mine. And for anyone who's been editing more than 3-4 years (an ever-increasing percentage of the editing community), "software" issues were things they had to pretty much solve themselves within the volunteer community. For years, most developers were volunteers too, and had close links to the editing community. At least a good portion of you remember those days - because you used to be those volunteer developers that community members would hit up to fix things, and you used to watch the village pumps to figure out what else needed to be fixed. Until very recently, it was almost unheard-of for community members to be told that problematic things were going to stay that way because of a decision made by a small number of people in an office somewhere. When most developers were clearly participating as community members, they behaved as though they were, at least to a significant extent, accountable to both the editing and Mediawiki communities; I'm not sure that sense of accountability exists anymore. Now, I don't think anyone begrudges the many talented developers who started off within the community having taken the opportunity to move on to paid positions at the WMF, and I think on the whole the big-picture community is overall very happy with the majority of changes that have come with the increased professionalization of the site engineering and operations. But this is a major change in culture, and the gulf between volunteers (either developer or editor) and WMF staff is widening noticeably as time progresses. I could tell who was a volunteer and who was staff from the way their posts were responded to in this thread; I doubt that would have been the case even two years ago. It's pretty clear that the objectives of this project are not successfully met at this point, and in fact have caused major problems on non-Latin script WMF sites, and significant but less critical problems on Latin script sites. Several factors for this have been identified in the thread - including limited attention to the effects on non-Latin script projects, the insertion of philosophical principles (FOSS) without a clear understanding of the effects this would have on the outcome, and the unwillingness to step back when a major change results in loss of functionality. Think a bit more. If this change is a cornerstone of future design changes, it needs to work on all WMF projects, and as currently structured you already know it can't. It may well be best to pull back to status quo ante in order to consider how to design not just for Latin-script sites, but for Chinese, Arabic and Vietnamese ones. Members of those communities may not be writing to this mailing list, but most of the non-Latin projects are growing much faster than the older, Latin-script sites. They're our future. They have to be in the mix. Best, Risker _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
