>And the post seems extremely proud, and self-congratulatory about it.
Well, yeah. Doing anything successfully at the scale of Wikipedia is worthy of some praise - and I say that as a US midwesterner - a culture not exactly known as the epitome of hubris. :)
You might claim I have Stockholm syndrome or something since I worked with the team that developed this feature, but the discussion you highlight did have valid feedback. The process for respecting community governance and developing consensus is more complicated than any one person could imagine. It is frustrating and imperfect. Folks at the foundation like myself are trying to do better in how we approach, work with, and deploy software changes. I agree too that it took a long time to develop, but that's not on any one single community's shoulders.
For instance, after doing due diligence we approached the English community again earlier this month and the result of that discussion was quite boring.
For a technical example that lead to the time it took, the team looked at how we were generating the previews and saw an opportunity to improve them. Previously we tried to parse a bunch of wikitext with a list as long as my arm of exclusions and edge cases. Then the team figured out a way to return HTML summaries from the source article. Not just something useful for this feature and a huge improvement to how information is rendered (like math formulas). Refactoring the code and implementing a new API endpoint took time.
I hope this doesn't come across as too argumentative, I wanted to provide an alternative perspective from someone who works daily with product teams and communities within the Wikimedia movement.
Thanks for engaging! To clarify my point, I do think that a the process was followed, and it did lead to some good points but if a process is taking 4+ years to launch something relatively simple (compared to what other companies with similar scale and teams might launch), then the process itself is flawed. I'm respectful of your work, but critical of the system that it operates under.
One could argue that Wikipedia has a broader responsibility to the readers than to just the editors, and such a process gives the editors undue weight in the process. The vocal minority cannot always represent the needs of the silent majority and that role would lie with the product team, which in my understanding hasn't been the case at Wikipedia (I say this, and having interviewed and turned down a Wikipedia PM offer and having a few friends worked in Design at Wikipedia and leaving disillusioned).
Well, yeah. Doing anything successfully at the scale of Wikipedia is worthy of some praise - and I say that as a US midwesterner - a culture not exactly known as the epitome of hubris. :)
You might claim I have Stockholm syndrome or something since I worked with the team that developed this feature, but the discussion you highlight did have valid feedback. The process for respecting community governance and developing consensus is more complicated than any one person could imagine. It is frustrating and imperfect. Folks at the foundation like myself are trying to do better in how we approach, work with, and deploy software changes. I agree too that it took a long time to develop, but that's not on any one single community's shoulders.
For instance, after doing due diligence we approached the English community again earlier this month and the result of that discussion was quite boring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscel...
For a technical example that lead to the time it took, the team looked at how we were generating the previews and saw an opportunity to improve them. Previously we tried to parse a bunch of wikitext with a list as long as my arm of exclusions and edge cases. Then the team figured out a way to return HTML summaries from the source article. Not just something useful for this feature and a huge improvement to how information is rendered (like math formulas). Refactoring the code and implementing a new API endpoint took time.
I hope this doesn't come across as too argumentative, I wanted to provide an alternative perspective from someone who works daily with product teams and communities within the Wikimedia movement.