Hoi,
When I watch Jimmy, it is a lot like Wikipedia. There is a lot I like but I
do not like everything. This time was no different. However LIKE Wikipedia
there is so much that I like that I will not abandon it.
The notion that the "community" is free to choose whatever negates the
technical point that certain innovations are intended to NOT be backwards
compatible. Choices are made all the time that are NOT backwards
compatible, often it does not affect user land really and then there is
supposed to be no problem. It is just a different public that "suffers" the
consequences. At Wikimania the Wikidatafication of Commons was mentioned
often and in many contexts. This needs to happen when we want to have multi
lingual search and other goodie goodies that is the point of it all. In my
understanding it is a game changer and it will change things more than what
is being discussed at the moment.
I can see the Media Viewer as a precursor of these changes.
NB several of the proposals re Wikidatafication are imho a bit daft.
However, the need for it is such that I prefer something that is half baked
to start off with than nothing at all.
We disagree on the amount of attention that is given.. In my appreciation
we do not invest in tools that affect readers that much and it only started
fairly recently. It is the editors and even more so the admins / power
users that have the most attention available to them. They often role their
own tools and consequently are not assured of continued support for their
tools. These more sophisticated users are often mistaken for the community.
It certainly is the most vocal subgroup of our eco-system but it is not
them we aim to serve.
I am not into second guessing what the WMF could or should do. I have
opinions and they typically are about how and where I think we could do
better. So my two pennies worth is that:
- Reasonator like functionality is our future for much of the
information we have.
- Wikipedia can have its sources but Wikidata, certainly for now, cannot
be relied on having sources. Confidence is to be had by comparing the
information it holds with other sources (including individual Wikipedias)
- When our data is not used, we might be better off not having it.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 12 August 2014 10:43, Strainu <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Gerard,
>
> Some answers (in a random order).
>
> 2014-08-11 12:20 GMT+03:00 Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]>:
> > You know our projects, you know our licenses. If you, the "community"do
> not
> > like what you have, you can fork. At Wikimania forking and leaving the
> > community was very much discussed. Watch Jimbo's presentation for
> instance,
> > he may be aghast that I quote him here but in his state of the Wiki he
> made
> > it abundantly clear that it is your option to stay or go.
>
> I gave up watching Jimbo's keynotes a few years ago, as I would
> invariably get pissed off. So, should we understand that the vast
> ammounts of money and resources spent on editor retention are a waste
> of our money? I sincerely hope this is a heat-of-the-moment argument,
> just like the one about closing de.wp.
>
> > Hoi,
> > Code review should be a strictly technical process surely. However the
> > community CANNOT decide on everything.
>
> Agreed. How about letting the WMF decide for anonymous users and the
> community decide for logged-in users? Presumably, the logged-in users
> have access to a large panel of options and can make up their own mind
> if they disagree with the consensus. Of course, discussions should not
> disappear because of such a separation, but even become more active
> and hopefully less aggressive.
>
>
> > When you are in those conversations you realise that many
> > complications are considered; it is not easy nor obvious.
> > NB there is not one community, there are many with often completely
> > diverging opinions. Technically it is not possible to always keep
> backward
> > compatibility / functionality. We are not backward we need to stay
> > contemporary.
>
> As a software engineer in a publicly traded company, I understand the
> reasoning behind more than 90% of the decisions made by the
> Engineering staff - and this worries me terribly, because they *don't*
> work for a company. Their objectives and approaches should be
> different.
>
> There are three main wiki-use-cases that should receive similar levels
> of attention:
> * reading
> * basic editing
> * advanced editing
>
> The first two receive a lot of love, but the third one not so much,
> it's even hindered by initiatives designed for the first two. I'm not
> saying that we should keep backwards compatibility forever, but since
> the WMF wants to deploy stuff early in order to get feedback, it
> should begin by offering it as a beta (they do that now), then, when
> reaching a decent level of stability, deploy it for anonymous users
> and opt-in users and only when it reaches feature-parity with the
> feature being replaced should it be pushed for everybody (keeping an
> opt-out feature for some time - months or a couple of years).
>
> Take for instance the media viewer: the current version is useless for
> editors, as it has basically no controls visible by default (without
> scrolling). The future version, presented at Wikimania, has a lot more
> stuff visible on the first screen, making it much easier to use for
> editing. I believe that the media viewer should have been kept as
> opt-in for logged in users until this future version arrives.
>
> Strainu
>
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