[Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27

Tue Sep 28 23:41:28 UTC 2010

On 28 September 2010 18:58, Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com
> >wrote:
>
> > We would be better off with more people working
> > seriously to figure out the best answers to the issues this feature
> > addresses, plus whatever issues there may be with the feature itself,
> > rather than having a debating duel about the significance of a set of
> > polling statistics. It's like having politicians decide how to govern
> > entirely based on opinion polls.
> >
>
> This is really a much better point than I made.
>

Yes it is, and it's an important one.  Several of us had already been
working on a plan for the second trial, and those of us discussing had
widely agreed that it would be much more likely to be successful if more of
the recommendations on improving the software were incorporated, thus our
recommendation that it not proceed so rapidly.

It's pretty hard to maintain motivation, though, when it's clear that the
software's going to be a permanent feature regardless of what the project
does or thinks, and that any further "trial" is not going to change that
fact.

I don't often write to this list, and I realise that I sound fairly negative
in this thread.  The fact of the matter is that I personally entered more
articles into the first trial than any other administrator (20% of all
articles involved), that I actively and strongly encouraged other
administrators to do so as well, that I pushed hard to ensure that the
largest number of editors possible received reviewer permissions, and I was
one of the few people who trialed the version on the test wiki in the two
weeks before it went live, finding a significant number of problems (some of
which were addressed in advance of the release).  I was also the person who
made sure that the WMF spokesperson with respect to the trial was in
agreement with the prior stated position of the community, and that the
feature would be turned off if there was not clear and unambiguous support
for it at the end of the trial, just to make sure we were all on the same
page.

So, yes...right now I (and several other administrators who were very active
in this trial) are very disturbed at what has happened here. We felt there
was a clear criterion for continued use of the tool, which was worthy of our
collective time, energy and powers of persuasion. With that in mind, it's
almost impossible to consider developing a second trial, since it doesn't
seem like it will matter what criteria for continued use the project
determines.

Risker/Anne