Re: [Foundation-l] HR and Recruiting Feed on Identi.ca and Twitter

[William Pietri]

> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Steven Walling 
> wrote:
>> I don't think that was constructive criticism. Personally I think that
>> Foundation staff should be applauded for trying to be more transparent
>> about
>> hiring, even if you disagree with what they might be experimenting with.
>>
>> Steven Walling
> You mean the transparency that they have been repeatably asked for in
> the past by people and was denied by staff because updating even a
> simple on wiki list would "take too long"? Although i guess a
> microblog feed will make it easier for people such as those staff and
> contractors who had to ask other staff (who apparently had to ask even
> more people) about who people in the building even were and if they
> were meant to be there.

That seems like a further example of unconstructive criticism. If you'd
like to take some particular person to task for failing to meet your
personal standards, perhaps you could do it directly, rather than in front
of an audience of thousands? That's likely to be more effective, and is
certain to have fewer unwelcome side effects.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] HR and Recruiting Feed on Identi.ca and Twitter

[William Pietri]

K. Peachey wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Daniel Phelps 
> [...]
>> I invite you all to see these data streams -
>> http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork/all or
>> http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork.  Eventually we also hope to find
>> more ways to use this feed for recruiting and reaching out to a larger
>> candidate pool and audience.  There will also be times where we link the
>> streams or feeds to longer and more detailed blog postings.
>>
>> -Daniel
> So you know, all the times people asked to have better systems to
> inform of new hirings such as on wiki pages but get told it would take
> too long to update them, you decide to implement a even more stupid
> and time consuming system in which limited information can be sent
> out.
> -Peachey

The microblog seems like a pretty reasonable approach to me, really. At my
company we're doing a lot of internal documentation via blog and microblog
entries. Those platforms are very easy to update, keeping costs low.
Unlike wiki pages, they don't create an ongoing maintenance burden, or set
false expectations about the freshness of the content.

Don't get me wrong, I love wikis. But if the goal is to keep people
updated on the status of something, the tools built around status updates
are pretty swell.

Anyhow, I appreciate any and all steps the WMF takes toward greater
transparency.


William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Call for Volunteers: Wikimedia Research Committee

[William Pietri]

  On 08/07/2010 01:30 PM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
> So your peer reviewed experience iiis. the co-authoring of a single paper
> published in a supplement? Less than say, a particularly good management
> undergrad. Forgive me; a director of marketing at that level does exactly
> how much direct marketing?

I think that, as evidenced by his bans from several wikis, there is 
pretty wide consensus on the nature and value of Gregory Kohs's 
contributions to this project, so I don't think there's much benefit in 
stirring up yet another wing-ding along the lines of the previous ones.

I understand why it's tempting, but I'd ask all list participants to 
carefully consider the thousands of readers of this list before 
discussing this topic further. There are many good uses for this 
particular mailing list, but this is not one of them:

http://xkcd.com/386/

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Self-determination of language versions in questions of skin?

[William Pietri]

On 07/04/2010 11:06 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> So I hereby admit to being wrong both
> in what I asked and how I asked  it, and beg your forgiveness. And I
> bet you don't see people do that much on the Internet ;-)
>


No, which makes it especially worth appreciating, on three levels. 
First, is says something good about the person. Second, it can really 
move a discussion along. And third, it serves as an example for future 
discussions, like begetting like. So thanks!

Regarding the last point, I don't have time to run it, but I'm glad to 
endow the first year of the David Gerard Apology of the Month Prize. 
(Mensch of the month? WP:COOL of the month? I'm open to better names.) 
I'm thinking a Wikipedia globe t-shirt sent to the community member who 
most clearly demonstrates an excess of reasonableness in a difficult 
community discussion. If anybody wants to wrangle that, just let me know 
each month's winner and CafePress shirt choice.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Self-determination of language versions in questions of skin?

[William Pietri]

On 07/03/2010 06:11 PM, David Gerard wrote:
>> That's phrased in terms of dominance. It's in effect asking who's the
>> bigger monkey. I think that's a conversation worth avoiding where possible.
>>  
>
> The dominance element was brought in, as you well know, by Trevor
> Parscal's preremptory reversion of the removal of the collapsed list.
> The dominance was, as you well know, already blatantly exercised. The
> question now is what defences are possible.
>

Honestly, I've only followed this casually, so I've lost track of who 
exactly did what. But "X did it first" is a weak argument. As far as I 
can tell, this is jusjt another Wrong Version situation.

> Please, stop trying to obfuscate.
>

I'm not trying to obfuscate. I just think power jockeying is a giant 
waste of time when everybody's allegedly on the same side -- and given 
our mission, I think we are. This is less a participant's opinion about 
community/foundation relations, and more my professional opinion about 
how to handle design questions in modern, highly iterative software 
development projects.

Many of the people doing well at this are intensely data-driven. 
YouTube, for example, uses four major independent sources of data to 
inform design hypotheses, and then they rigorously split-test all 
proposed changes to monitor impacts on a host of key metrics. They 
tinker relentlessly, running dozens of experiments in parallel and 
releasing at least weekly. They only give new designs significant 
traffic when they've found a measurable improvement.

Wikipedia, given its open, do-ocractic nature, shouldn't be less 
data-focused than places like that. We should be striving to be leaders, 
not 5 years behind best practice. In my view, arguing over who's the 
biggest monkey, and therefore therefore gets to pick which Wrong Version 
we settle on, is just a big distraction from actual productive work. 
Large corporations can afford that sort of waste, but I don't think a 
mission-driven one should tolerate it.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Self-determination of language versions in questions of skin?

[William Pietri]

On 07/03/2010 04:47 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> Well. not really. He's asking the same question Greg Maxwell and I
> asked last month about the language list defaulting to open rather
> than closed: If a wiki voted for it, would that override the usability
> team's dictates? That was a straight "yes or no" question, like this
> is, and we only got weaseling too.
>

That's phrased in terms of dominance. It's in effect asking who's the 
bigger monkey. I think that's a conversation worth avoiding where possible.

I'd rather see people discuss this in terms of data, and what it implies 
for the mission. If an interface choice is controversial, that often 
means it's good for some people and bad for others. If we can find out 
which people are which, and the extent of the benefits or harms, we'll 
all be better off.

At the very least, we can have a more useful discussion, one framed by 
our mission, rather than by politicking. At best, the right answer will 
be obvious, and perhaps it will be an answer that didn't occur to us before.

Ook ook,

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Your abuse of moderator status

[William Pietri]

On 06/27/2010 12:45 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> On 27 June 2010 20:42, William Pietri  wrote:
>
>> >  Given that this is recurring drama-creating behavior, perhaps we can
>> >  move on to the "ignore" stage of WP:RBI.
>>  
> On enwiki, we did that ages ago. I don't believe he is blocked on
> Wikiversity (yet).
>

Sorry I wasn't clear. When I said "we", I meant foundation-l, not 
anything broader.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Your abuse of moderator status

[William Pietri]

On 06/27/2010 12:10 PM, quiddity wrote:
>> According to Ottava, he is in charge of Wikiversity - sort of its
>> equivalent of Jimmy. He says the position was created through all of
>> his hard work and dedication.
>>  
> Huh? How so?
> http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Ottava+Rima&lang=en&wiki=wikiversity
> http://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=250&target=Ottava+Rima
> Citation required (for everything mentioned above).
>

Interesting. That led me to rummage a little, and apparently this is not 
the first time Ottava Rima has had trouble meeting project behavioral 
norms. He's currently under a 1-year ban on the English Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Ottava_Rima_restrictions

As part of that, Jayron32 describes what he sees as "Ottava Rima's 
standard MO": "He starts an entirely inappropriate discussion, and as 
soon as other editors call him on it, he starts to give 'official 
warnings' and all sorts of other inappropriate responses."

Given that this is recurring drama-creating behavior, perhaps we can 
move on to the "ignore" stage of WP:RBI.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] ASCAP comes out against "copyleft"

[William Pietri]

Hi, Jeffery. You are obviously upset about this, and it's coming across 
strongly enough in your writing that it undermines the effectiveness of 
the point you are trying to make. I see it's pretty hot in DC today. 
Perhaps now would be a good time for a cold drink and a break? We'll all 
still be here tomorrow.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia

[William Pietri]

On 06/16/2010 05:44 AM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
> On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, William Pietri wrote:
>
>> >  
>> > http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.php
>>  
> Wow, they used the right title! :D
>
> So did the BBC article[1]: "Wikipedia unlocks divisive pages for editing"
>

Indeed they did. I was pretty pleased as well.

I know some people don't appreciate the value of good press, or are 
skeptical of the effort put into communications. But for a top-10 web 
site that aims to serve the whole planet, the global press is a major 
part of our user interface, especially for casual readers, occasional 
editors, and many of our donors. A lot of people who read those news 
articles will never see our help or policy pages on this.

Since most people don't get to see the communications people work, I 
wanted to publicly say that they were great. They put a lot of thought 
and effort into this. At the time, I didn't fully understand why they 
were sweating some of the details so much, but now that I see the final 
result, I get how critical all that polishing was. Good press like this 
is no accident. They are pros, pros who understand Wikipedia and love 
what it stands for, and we're lucky to have them.

William


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[Foundation-l] Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia

[William Pietri]

Hmm... Forwarding messages as attachments clearly doesn't work, either. 
Perhaps the third time will be the charm. Sorry for the mess.

William



 Original Message 
Subject:Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia
Date:   Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:03:40 -0700
From:   William Pietri 
To: announc...@lists.wikimedia.org



As scheduled, Pending Changes went live on the English Wikipedia just 
after 4 pm Pacific (23:00 UTC) this afternoon!

The details of the trial are still being worked out by the English 
Wikipedia community, but it looks like they (or "you" as the case may 
be) will start off from a queue of carefully chosen pages [1] and see 
how to take it from there. For those who are interested in viewing the 
feature in the wild, Pending Changes is already enabled for, e.g, World 
War I [2] and Runescape [3]. Look in the top right corner for the 
pages-and-magnifying-glass icon.

Press coverage on this started yesterday with the BBC [4], and we've 
since received coverage in other sources in English (e.g., [5], [6]) and 
a variety of other languages. The coverage has, happily, been generally 
positive.

There were a few minor issues with the rollout, most of which have been 
resolved.  There are some minor UI issues that we will work through over 
the next few weeks, including some lively but good-natured opinions on 
the amount of yellow used. We'll be keeping a close eye on things over 
the next few days to make sure it all continues to go smoothly.

For those who want to get a sense of how the system is performing in 
terms of throughput (e.g., average time-to-approval), please visit the 
Pending Changes Stats page [7]. You'll also be able to browse pages 
needing review [8] and all pages with Pending Changes activated [9].

I want to thank the whole team involved on this, with special 
recognition to Aaron Schulz, the developer who has done the lion's share 
of the development. He has done great work, both in the development and 
in handling with the rollout.

William

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10312095.stm
[5] 
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.php 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/7829476/Wikipedia-rolls-out-pending-changes.html>
[6] http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/62518
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ValidationStatistics
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:OldReviewedPages
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:StablePages


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[Foundation-l] Fwd: Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia

[William Pietri]

I thought these lists were subscribed to the announcements list, but 
apparently not. Apologies if a duplicate turns up later.



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[Foundation-l] Pending Changes: looking good for tonight

[William Pietri]

Just wanted to give everybody a quick update on Pending Changes. 
Basically, it looks like we're in good shape for going live on the 
English Wikipedia shortly.

We rolled the new code yesterday afternoon Pacific time. We've had a few 
hiccups, but everything seems well in hand. The biggest issue wasn't 
discovered until the wee hourss of the morning; the new code fought with 
a configuration issue on the Hebrew Wikisource, apparently breaking the 
wiki. (Sorry for that!) Domas Mituzas fixed the config and had 
everything back up within a few hours of the initial report. Other than 
that, there have been some small issues fixed promptly by Aaron, Chad, 
Ariel, Tomasz, and Tim.

There has also been some lively feedback on some interface changes 
designed to make unreviewed edits more obvious. Some projects would 
rather that they not be quite so attention-getting, and so have used 
local CSS changes to quiet them down a bit. That's not a showstopper, 
but we'll definitely be taking a look at that issue soon.


The next step will be to enable Pending Changes on the English 
Wikipedia. That will take place in an hour or two. We expect that to go 
more smoothly. No new code will go out; we're just turning on the 
extension used elsewhere, with a config that has been tested for the 
last 10 weeks on a labs site. Once everything is working and stable, 
we'll let everybody know.

After that, we expect to release updates weekly to the English 
Wikipedia. We have some interface improvements already in the queue, but 
will be listening carefully. to the community for feedback.

William

P.S. We'll be doing a retrospective afterward to see what lessons we can 
learn from this, so if you have feedback, please send me an off-list 
email and I'll make sure it gets incorporated.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Top posting

[William Pietri]

On 06/14/2010 04:44 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> For your
> information, and for the somanyth time, top posting comes easy when you use
> a modern tool like GMAIL. It automatically hides whatever came before. This
> whole notion has no relevance to me as a consequence.  I get hundreds of
> mails and the notion that one should be answered differently then others is
> not easy to consider. I answer to the content to a mail and that is not
> related to who will receive it. [...]
>

The difference is that we're really talking about two different media.

Email is great for small groups of involved people having a discussion.

Large mailing lists are ways of using the tools of email to distribute 
content to thousands of people with widely differing levels of 
involvement and engagement. It's publishing, disguised as discussion. 
That throws a lot of people off.


If you're having trouble telling the difference between the two because 
you've chosen to use the same tool for both, one possible solution is 
for you to use a different tool for each. There are plenty of other 
solutions, too. Pursuing any of them requires, of course, that the 
writer values the reader experience over authorial convenience. I think 
that's helpful in any sort of publishing, not just mailing lists. 
Helpful for readers and writers alike.

William

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[Foundation-l] Appreciation (was: Are Wikimedia websites a proper venue for an artistic contest ?)

[William Pietri]

On 06/12/2010 08:10 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
> [...] for instance, so far the
> only recognition I got for uploading the complete set of images of Beijing
> Subway (I have all 147 stations and uploaded so far about 50, more than the
> number of the station images existed on Commons a month ago), categorizing
> all this mess and adding pictures and links to Commons in all articles in
> all languages where they exist - the only recognition I got was one of my
> edits on one of Wikipedias instantly reverted. For the record, I spend
> several days of my time to take the pictures, and even more time to edit
> them.
>

I think this is an important point.

Until recently, I worked a lot with engineering teams to improve the way 
they worked. For whatever reason, a lot of engineering organizations are 
very focused on the negative. In every silver lining, they can find a 
cloud. I've seen teams do a retrospective on their week and come up with 
50 negative observations and 0 positive ones. This has its benefits, but 
it also has some incredible downsides.

The biggest one is just that it discourages risk and effort. In theory, 
most organizations want their people to get fired up to make things 
better. But for the individuals in those negative organizations, the 
best possible outcome from any action is getting ignored, with a 
substantial chance of getting yelled at for some downside of the 
improvement. There's not even appreciation for succeeding, let alone 
appreciation for having the gumption to try.

In that environment, the optimal strategy is to do nothing bold, and to 
do just enough to avoid getting yelled at for doing nothing, while 
waiting for the chance to yell at somebody else for not being perfect. 
Over time, people like that tend to say, while people who actually want 
to make things better give up and go somewhere else.

I haven't done enough editing lately to know what the general 
contributor is like, but Yaroslav's story reminded me of ones I've heard 
over and over from engineers in organizations with significant cultural 
problems.

William


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[Foundation-l] Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection) update for June 10

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Pending Changes update.

We proceed boldly toward launch. The main update is that we have pushed 
the English Wikipedia launch back one day to Tuesday, June 15. That will 
let us avoid stepping on the WP Academy Israel event, and it means Jimmy 
Wales will be available to talk to the press, which in turn will yield a 
better public understanding of Pending Changes.

However, we will still be rolling the new FlaggedRevs code into 
production on Monday, June 14th (circa 4 pm Pacific, or 23:00 GMT). We 
hope that this, aside from some minor UI improvements, will pass 
unnoticed on the project currently using FlaggedRevs. If there are bugs, 
we look forward to hearing about them via the usual channels, including 
#wikimedia-tech [1]. Minor bugs will be fixed in place; any major issues 
will result in a quick rollback to the existing code.

More prosaically, we had a number of bits of work verified complete this 
week, including a number of little bugs. Our thanks to the German 
community for their diligent testing of a labs instance of the German 
configuration.


If you'd like once last chance to see what's coming, try the latest code 
updates on our labs site:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157




William

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Channels

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[Foundation-l] Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection) update for June 3

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Pending Changes update.

The big news is that we have picked a date for releasing the new version 
of Flagged Revisions and launching the trial of Pending Changes on the 
English Wikipedia: June 14.

I'd like to stress that this will be a trial. The goal is to learn, 
which means that things will not be perfect at launch. There are many 
areas where we hope to verify our current work and see what improvements 
can be made:

 * the technical underpinnings
 * the interface and language as experienced by
 * our readers
 * casual editors
 * serious editors
 * reviewers
 * admins
 * which articles should be covered
 * how best to use Pending Changes

We think we have something that is workable as is, and have notions for 
possible improvements down the road. To know what improvements are the 
right ones, we'll need real use and community feedback. We intend to 
respond speedily to community concerns and lessons learned from actual 
use. To that end we aim to keep to the same weekly release schedule that 
we've been using on labs these last few months.


More mundanely, the work completed this week includes ops documentation, 
the completion of the terminology work, and some interface improvements. 
We've also had some vigorous testing done by the folks at Calcey, who 
discovered a few bugs for us.

If you'd like to see the current condition of things, you can try it out 
here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


We expect to release to labs again next week, after which we intend to 
go live on the English Wikipedia.


William

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[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for May 27

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

The loose-end tidying and rollout prep proceeds apace. This week's 
rollout prep includes preparing for an emergency rollback, something 
that we don't expect will be necessary but for which we nonetheless need 
to be ready.

We've been working diligently on the text, which is a key component of 
the user interface. You can see the enwiki-specific parts of that here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Message_updates

As part of that text work, we are also, as readers of these lists know, 
considering changing the name of the English Wikipedia deployment from 
Flagged Protection to something more easily comprehended by the general 
public. If you'd like to weigh in on the many options, here's the place:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions/Terminology

The main thing standing between us and being able to give a release date 
is some trouble with part of the UI. If you're a HTML & CSS guru, we 
could use your help:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-May/047916.html


We also fixed a bug this week. Thanks to Sonia, who found and reported 
that bug. Want to emulate her? Start here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/26/2010 07:05 PM, Aphaia wrote:
> Personally I support  "Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch" so your
> direction saddened me a bit, anyway
>

I think the only solution is to make that a user-selectable preference.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/24/2010 07:34 AM, David Levy wrote:
> I disagree.  I think that it should be as clear as possible that this
> process exists to counter inappropriate edits, not as an Orwellian
> measure intended to be used indiscriminately throughout the
> encyclopedia (because we want to "double check" good edits before
> allowing them to attain normal status).
>

That's an interesting point, and one I hadn't thought about. I could see 
it going either way. On the one hand, names are powerful. On the other 
hand, they lose some of their power once familiar, and the Wikipedia 
community is often so thoroughly skeptical that calling the feature Free 
Money For Everybody might not be enough to cause indiscriminate use.

Either way, it's a good point, and I hope that people weighing in on 
this think of names from that angle too.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/24/2010 08:31 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>   We could use a name which expresses_nothing_
> about what is going on, thus making it clear that you can't figure it
> out simply from the name.
>

That did cross my mind, and it was tempting. But practically, many busy 
journalists, causal readers, and novice editors may base a lot of their 
initial reaction on the name alone, or on related language in the 
interface. By choosing an arbitrary name, some fraction of people will 
dig deeper, but another fraction will just retain their perplexity 
and/or alienation.

Basically, an arbitrary name struck me as a wasted opportunity to convey 
at least a hint to a lot of people, so I didn't even suggest any names 
like this.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/24/2010 08:49 AM, Nathan wrote:
> Edit check, review gap, review delay, check delay, wait approval,
> content pause, review pause, second check, second approval, etc. There
> are lots of possible names for this feature. Sometimes I worry that
> the Foundation staff work for a company built upon the value of
> community generated content and community sourced ideas, but don't
> truly *believe* that this value exists or can be relied upon. The best
> example is the fund-raising drive, when much of the best and most
> useful content came from the community after the original (and
> expensive) content was widely panned. Why not involve the community at
> the beginning? A request for endorsement of your favored options is
> not the same thing, and fails to harness real community enthusiasm.
>

A legitimate worry, but in this case I don't think that's what happened.

A few months back we discussed changing the name, but nothing exciting 
resulted from it. We couldn't come up with anything that seemed 
significantly better. Recently, two things happened. One, we were 
working on all the little bits of text, trying to choose good labels for 
things. We'd left that for relatively late in the process because it's 
easier to do that in a single sweep. Two, as part of pre-rollout 
activities, a broader set of people got involved.

Both of those activities caused people to look at the name anew, and a 
number of people got together to take another swing at it. They ended up 
with two candidates that they liked better. At that point, we involved 
the community to get a broader opinion. But we're all committed to 
shipping this as soon as possible, and that a new name, while nice, 
wasn't important enough to delay release. Thus, an attempt at keeping 
things quick. That again is based in my interpretation of what the 
community wants.



William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/24/2010 07:34 AM, David Levy wrote:
> Rob has explicitly asked us to comment on these names and set up a
> forum in which to do so (and propose alternatives).  You've vigorously
> defended the name drawing the most opposition and declined to comment
> on the name drawing the most support, and that's fine.  But please
> don't suggest that we're wasting our time by doing what Rob asked of
> us.
>
>

I'm not arguing for any name in particular. I have argued against some 
notions about names that I think are incorrect. Broadly, I think it's 
easy for insiders to incorrectly use themselves as proxies for what 
regular users will think. That's a very common mistake in my field, so I 
spoke up.

But I said before and I say again that am avoiding having an opinion on 
whatever the best name is. It's a lot of work to do it properly, 
especially for me as an insider, and I don't have time for it right now. 
I'm not suggesting that people are wasting their time working on this, 
and in fact think just the opposite. I think it's great, and supported 
bringing this up for community discussion.

William



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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/23/2010 07:51 PM, David Levy wrote:
> William Pietri wrote:
>
>
>> I think insiders will adjust to any name we choose, as some of our
>> existing names attest. So I think as long as the name isn't hideous or
>> actively misleading, then my main criterion is how it comes across to
>> novices. For them, I'd suspect most will take "double check" as it's
>> used colloquially,
>>  
> My understanding is that we seek to avoid colloquialisms, which are
> particularly difficult for non-native English speakers to comprehend.
>

In theory, certainly. In practice, I have a hard time believing that 
non-native speakers would struggle with a name "Double Check" more than 
they'd struggle with any of the other names.


> And honestly, if I were not already familiar with the process in
> question, I would interpret "Double Check" to mean "checked twice
> after submission" (and I'm a native English speaker and Wikipedian
> since 2005).  Someone unfamiliar with our existing processes might
> assume that everything is routinely checked once by an outside party
> (and this is an additional check).
>
> Such potential for misunderstanding is non-trivial, as this feature's
> deployment is likely to generate significant mainstream media
> coverage.
>

I think that any name we choose is going to leave a lot of people 
confused about what's going on, especially if they sit their and 
ruminate on it. The most we can ask of a name is that it gives them a 
vague sense of what's going on, and doesn't cause too much confusion as 
they read further.


>> but if some do get the notion that it's checked twice by others rather than
>> once, I see little harm done.
>>  
> If the general public is led to believe that we're instituting a
> second check because an existing check isn't working (as evidenced by
> the disturbing edits already widely reported), this will be quite
> injurious to Wikipedia's reputation.
>

I know that these names have been worked over extensively by Jay and 
Moka, who have a lot of experience dealing with reporters and the 
general public. They were pretty happy with the two names that were part 
of the initial proposal from Rob, so I am willing to trust their 
professional judgment as far as reaction from the press and the person 
on the street. More, in fact, than I trust my own, as I know that I'm 
tainted by long years as a programmer and as a participant here and in 
Ward's wiki.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/23/2010 07:56 PM, Alex wrote:
>> I think that fits in nicely with James Alexander's view: we can and
>> should assume that most editors have already checked their work. Not
>> against the minutiae of our rules, but against their own intent, and
>> their understanding of what constitutes an improvement to Wikipedia.
>>   
>> Given that, I think double-check fits in fine, both in a very literal
>> sense and in the colloquial one. I ask people to double-check my work
>> all the time, with the implied first check always being my own.
>>  
> We can assume most, but we cannot assume all. It is the ones that don't
> that we're especially concerned about. So, the revisions that get
> "double checked" are mostly the ones that don't actually need it. The
> intentionally bad edits are only getting a single check.
>

Sorry if I was unclear. I was speaking about the naming issue. I think 
it's ok if our name for this generally assumes the happy case. The 
essence of a wiki, both notionally and practically, is the assumption 
that people are generally doing something good. Protection, which 
focuses on the trouble a few bad actors can cause, is a big step away 
from that notion. Flagged Protection moves back toward the original wiki 
spirit. So I think it's fine if the name has a positive connotation.

As a bonus, expectations often drive behaviors; if you act as if people 
are up to something good, they are more likely to get up to something 
good. And the opposite is certainly true as well. So I think a positive 
name isn't a bad thing.

Practically, yes, I agree we can't assume all edits are good; if we 
were, there'd be little point to this project. As I mentioned elsewhere, 
I'd eventually like to see this getting to the point where multiple 
people can express an opinion on an edit. Knowing that 1 person reviewed 
an edit is good; knowing that 5 people did is better.


> And of course, this raises the question, if we're assuming that most
> editors are checking their work and are trying to improve the
> encyclopedia, why do we need to double check their work? We wouldn't
> call the system "Second guess", but that's kind of what this explanation
> sounds like.
>

For the purposes of naming, I don't think that's an issue. Insiders will 
know that not all edits are perfect, and edits and articles are getting 
continuously checked over.

The main reason to put extra effort into choosing this name is for 
outsiders. I'd wager that most of them still have no idea how this 
works. At this point people have to accept that Wikipedia does somehow 
function, but I doubt they know how or why. That on certain articles we 
will review changes before they go live seems perfectly natural and very 
positive to most non-Wikipedians that I've talked to about this. 
Especially when you frame it in terms of BLP, which is one of the potent 
forces driving the adoption of this.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/24/2010 01:41 AM, Ziko van Dijk wrote:
> In German Wikipedia, our word "gesichtet" is a little bit strange.
> "Sichten" is like spotting a rare animal in the wilderness.
>

That's funny. Internally, especially in technical discussions, "sighted" 
gets used a fair bit. All this time I'd been assuming that, however 
weird "sighted" sounded in English, it must be perfectly good German.

For non-native speakers, "sighted" is rarely used in English. The main 
uses I can think of are to describe a person who isn't blind ("For the 
hike we paired a sighted person with each blind one"), for spotting rare 
animals, or for an archaic nautical flavor ("Cap'n! The bosun's mate has 
sighted the pirate ship from the fo'csle!").

As they say, there's sometimes a quality in a good translation that you 
just can't get in the original.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/23/2010 06:37 PM, David Levy wrote:
> And again, the main problem is ambiguity.  "Double Check" can easily
> be interpreted to mean that two separate post-submission checks are
> occurring.  It also is a chess term (and could be mistaken for a a
> reference to that concept).
>

I think insiders will adjust to any name we choose, as some of our 
existing names attest. So I think as long as the name isn't hideous or 
actively misleading, then my main criterion is how it comes across to 
novices. For them, I'd suspect most will take "double check" as it's 
used colloquially, but if some do get the notion that it's checked twice 
by others rather than once, I see little harm done. Personally, I think 
that's the direction that the system should take in the long term: 
there's no reason to stop multiple people from opining on an edit, and 
there's substantial potential benefit.


> What is your opinion of the proposed name "Revision Review"?
>

I confess that I've mainly avoided having an opinion on this topic. Not 
that it isn't a worthy thing to consider; good names are incredibly 
important. It's just they're also a lot of work, and much of my 
attention is focused elsewhere. I suspect I'll be hesitantly fine with 
whatever name ends up getting picked. Fine because there are several 
good candidates and plenty of smart, skilled people involved. Hesitant 
because my preferred way to measure names is by user-testing them to see 
how names drive pre-use perception and in-use behavior. That's 
impractical here, so we really won't know how well our chosen name works 
until we see reactions to media stories and actual use.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/23/2010 02:13 PM, David Levy wrote:
> James Alexander wrote:
>
>> That is basically exactly how I see it, most times you "double check"
>> something you are only the 2nd person because the first check is done by the
>> original author. We assume good faith, we assume that they are putting
>> legitimate and correct information into the article and checked to make sure
>> it didn't break any policies, it's just that because of problems on that
>> page we wanted to have someone double check.
>>  
> That's a good attitude, but such an interpretation is far from
> intuitive.  Our goal is to select a name that stands on its own as an
> unambiguous description, not one that requires background knowledge of
> our philosophies.
>
> I'll also point out that one of the English Wikipedia's most important
> policies is "ignore all rules," a major component of which is the
> principle that users needn't familiarize themselves with our policies
> (let alone "check to make sure" they aren't breaking them) before
> editing.
>

Allow me to quote the whole policy: "If a rule prevents you from 
improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." That implies, in my view 
correctly, that the person editing is presumed to set out with the 
intention of making the encyclopedia better.

I think that fits in nicely with James Alexander's view: we can and 
should assume that most editors have already checked their work. Not 
against the minutiae of our rules, but against their own intent, and 
their understanding of what constitutes an improvement to Wikipedia.

Given that, I think double-check fits in fine, both in a very literal 
sense and in the colloquial one. I ask people to double-check my work 
all the time, with the implied first check always being my own.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/22/2010 09:25 AM, MZMcBride wrote:
>   If I were a betting man, I'd say the next
> "deadline" will be "before Wikimania!" When that passes, everyone can get
> distracted spending six months focusing on the annual fundraiser and we'll
> see you in 2011. Think I'm wrong? Prove it.
>

Would you care to become a betting man? It would be a  deep and abiding 
pleasure to take your money. My friend Ben Franklin is pretty sure 
you're wrong.

Of course, as to proving it, we're doing our best. Open code, open 
project plan, weekly project updates, weekly releases to a labs 
environment that any interested party can use. And lately, more people, 
both internally and externally are getting involved as we prepare for 
release. If it is all a conspiracy, it's either getting bigger and 
bigger or cleverer and cleverer.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/21/2010 07:03 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Rob Lanphier  wrote:
>
>> implementation, and there's no "flagging" in the proposed configuration.
>> Additionally, "protection" in our world implies "no editing" whereas this
>>  
> [snip]
>
>>- Must not introduce obsolete terminology (e.g. there's no "flagging" in
>>our proposed deployment)
>>  
> I guess I'm confused, because I see flagging all over this but you're
> saying there is none?
> To the best of my understanding:
>
> The flags are what distinguishes approved revisions from non-approved
> revisions and on designated pages controls which revisions are
> displayed by default to anons.
>


I think under the hood this is true; as a programmer, the term flag, as 
in a binary condition marker often found in sets, makes sense to me 
here. But I don't think it does in normal English usage. In non-jargon 
usage, one normally flags something for review or attention, and here's 
it's just the opposite: when one takes an action with Flagged 
Protection, one marks the item as trusted.




>> Additionally, "protection" in our world implies "no editing" whereas this
>>  
> The protection interface controls and has long a number of things
> related to the permissions granted to manipulate a page.  The same
> protection interface allows a page to be "move protected" for example,
> which doesn't do anything related to _editing_ but instead prevents
> the page from being moved to a new name.   Following that mode, this
> feature enables the protection of the flagging process on pages which
> users deem require that level of protection— just as there as is the
> case for the other protective modes.
>

You're totally right that Flagged Revisions and Flagged Protection fit 
perfectly well from the perspective of a technical insider. I think if 
that were the only issue, then we'd just stick with what we had.

The concern here is for the millions of outsiders that will come in 
contact with this, and the many outsiders that we would like to come at 
least a little farther inside. For those people, a name that makes sense 
only after you've learned other insider concepts or jargon is a problem. 
An name that is instantly comprehended is a real benefit to them.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[William Pietri]

On 05/21/2010 05:54 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
> Stop, take a deep breath, and look at the big picture: nobody cares.
>
> Most users don't edit. Most users who do edit won't care what the feature is
> called. Nobody cares. And I think you're a pretty smart guy who already
> realizes this, so I'm curious why there seems to be deliberate
> smoke-throwing here.
>
> Please, focus on the important issues and tell whoever is suggesting that
> this is one of them to stop erecting pseudo-hurdles that only further delay
> deployment.
>

If this were going to be delaying deployment, you would have a point. It 
won't. If I thought it would, I would have opposed it vigorously.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs - Do you forget about other projects?

[William Pietri]

On 05/21/2010 08:51 AM, Chad wrote:
> There are two things wrong here.
>
> The first is attempting to reuse messages for different purposes. If
> the workflow and ideas behind the UI are different, then there need
> to be different messages, not changing of ones that work just fine
> and make plenty of sense to the thousands already using them.
>

Agreed. Are other people using the English messages other than as a 
translation source?

> I'm aware of the distinction between FlaggedRevs and Flagged
> Protection, but it leads to the second problem. If the two proposals
> are so vastly different and their UIs different enough to cause issues
> with people already using it: why was it not done as a new extension
> entirely? Rather than trying to turn FR into the one-size-fits-all
> reviewing tool, it seems to me that we should've started a second
> extension. Of course it's too late to turn back now.
>

I wasn't around for a lot of the history, but from what I know all of 
the decisions made at the time were reasonable. Straying for a moment 
into the always risky if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now mode, I think we 
would have been better off building a much less flexible extension to 
begin with, one more targeted to the initial actual use. For Flagged 
Protection, though, my understanding is that adding further 
configurability to FlaggedRevs was the most efficient choice.

Regardless, you're right that we can't change history, and that any 
major refactoring of the code should wait until after we launch. I'll 
make sure we talk about this in the post-launch retrospective, though.

> Short of forking the Enwiki changes to its own extension (which isn't
> feasible at this point, I'll be the first to admit), I would suggest trying
> to segregate the two as much as humanly possible. The UIs and workflow
> for what the English Wikipedia wants FlaggedRevs to do and what it's
> been doing on other wikis for years are vastly different, and trying to
> reuse aspects of one in the other (especially messages!) will just confuse
> people already happily using FR.
>

Yep, agreed. We'll discuss this next we meet and see if we can come up 
with anything. Sounds like we'll be in the situation of having two sets 
of English strings: one as the generic translation source and one for 
use on the English Wikipedia. Is anybody aware of a precedent for that?

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs - Do you forget about other projects?

[William Pietri]

On 05/21/2010 07:16 AM, Chad wrote:
> All aspects of the interface are indeed configurable, like you said.
> And this is useful when projects want to tweak the wording or add
> additional information. They should not be used to illustrate different
> concepts across the different languages though.
>
> And as Daniel has pointed out, there is a difference between the
> meaning of "sighted" and "checked" or "review" and "approved."
> These differences may be subtle, but they do matter. And it should
> not fall on the communities to "fix" translations that have worked
> just fine for quite awhile now. When you change the meaning of
> an English message in MediaWiki, you affect all other supported
> languages as well. This is a regression in FlaggedRevs.
>

We're very aware of the power of names. For those who have been 
following my updates or the status of tasks in Tracker, you may have 
noticed that a text and naming task has been in progress for weeks. 
That's because good names are hard, and we really want to get them 
right. I'm not really involved in that, so perhaps Howie or RobLa can 
speak more directly to recent action there.

On the other hand, I think for FlaggedRevs the implied link between 
languages is weaker than a lot of other bits of MediaWiki. The 
FlaggedRevs extension is extremely configurable, and on top of the 
technological model the social model could plausibly vary quite a bit as 
well. Just to keep them straight, we've been calling the technology 
FlaggedRevs, and the English Wikipedia use of that tool Flagged 
Protection, because the English Wikipedia use is pretty different.

Daniel is definitely right that we hadn't been thinking about the effect 
of our localization on other projects. Internally, we've been thinking 
of ourselves as localizing the German version, which is the leading use 
and the one we're most familiar with. We had been localizing the English 
strings to the planned English Wikipedia use, without considering their 
role as a default translation source for other, different uses of the 
extension.

I'll certainly take this back to the team and see if we can come up with 
ideas to resolve the conflict, but if anybody has ways we could solve 
this problem, I'd love suggestions.

William


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[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for May 20

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

The quick summary is that we are continuing with pre-rollout activities, 
including UI polish, text and naming cleanup, and rollout planning.

One important milestone passed is that Tim Starling has looked over the 
code and done some profiling and given it his blessing from a 
performance perspective. He and the rest of the ops folks feel like the 
production gear is also in good shape for rolling this out. However, to 
prevent unpleasant launch surprises we've put in a configurable limit to 
the number of pages protected with this. We'll start out at a limit of 
2000 and bump it up based on actual production performance.

We believe we are technically ready to try out a labs version of the 
German config, just to double-check that our recent work will cause them 
no headaches. However, we need some German-speaker at least hazily 
familiar with FlaggedRevs to prepare the main page and help us with a 
call for testers. Any assistance there would be appreciated!

Speaking of assistance, we always welcome people trying out the 
extension before it goes live. You can do that here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_updates#2010_May_20


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

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Re: [Foundation-l] FYI: Wikipedia, Open Access and Cognitive Virology

[William Pietri]

On 05/15/2010 02:27 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
> But we do have serious competition, and it is scary and thrilling - it
> also happens to be published entirely in Chinese (hudong, baike).  But
> even if you don't know how to read Chinese, you can see how they
> display portals and amin pages; images, cartoons, and timelines; how
> they reference and discuss topics.  And you can sign up and see some
> of the social and community-building features they use to encourage
> participation.  (I'd love to see a detailed summary and translation of
> their policy tree -- especially policies on notability, fads, and
> trending topics -- to illuminate the discussions about how well our
> policies are doing in the larger Wikipedias.)
>

That sounds like material for an awesome group blog, a sort of ongoing 
competitive analysis.

It wouldn't have to only be about Chinese on-line encyclopedias, either. 
Just because the paper encyclopedia has become a bit of a joke [1] 
doesn't mean we can't learn things from it. There are plenty of other 
great reference works both current and historical that would be fun to 
examine. And I'm sure we could gain a lot by stealing ideas from other 
community and collaborative project websites.

However much Hudong and Baike are serious competitors, they're also 
mainly invisible to Wikipedians who don't go looking for them. There's a 
big difference between knowing intellectually that you're in a race and 
looking behind you seeing somebody running hard and gaining ground. I'd 
love to find a way to make the competition more obvious.


William



[1] Quite literally. This week Jon Stewart flipped open a paper 
reference book to make a point. After a slight pause, he lifted the book 
and dropped it on his desk with an audible thud. He smiled and said, 
"It's like Wikipedia, in a book!" 
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-may-11-2010/release-the-kagan 
(about 4:48 for the gag, although the book comes out about 3:45)

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Re: [Foundation-l] FYI: Wikipedia, Open Access and Cognitive Virology

[William Pietri]

On 05/15/2010 06:22 AM, Klaus Graf wrote:
> So there we are: OA's biggest canard and nemesis, being daily,
> cumulatively, canonized and amplified by Wikipedia, riding the recursive
> tide of its own notability and notoriety (as an infectious virus,
> cheerfully propagated by the denizens of Wikipedia).
>
> I expect that this posting will elicit stout defenses by Wiki-Warriors, [...]
>

Thanks for sharing this, Klaus. It was interesting to read.

I certainly enjoyed the spirited prose, and as a fiend for good names, I 
expect that I'd fully agree with the diagnosis of the root problem that 
brought forth such a lovely rant.

But at the end, I still have a, "Yeah, so?" reaction. I feel like the 
essence of the complaint is that contrary to what the authors want, 
other people persist in acting as they see fit. I have some sympathy, as 
most people signally fail to do what I want, too. But I don't see any 
obvious solutions.

Heck, I'd love it if our articles were based on pure, uncut Objective 
Truth, with no need to futz around with reliable sources and NPOV. 
Everybody would. But that stuff's expensive, and the only way I know to 
get that is by paying a horde of academics to do their thing. And even 
with all of them beavering away, we only get a trickle of the stuff, not 
the torrent we need to fill an encyclopedia.

Of course, if somebody, those folks included, think they can build a 
better encyclopedia, I'd encourage them to try. And I don't mean that in 
a snotty way; it would be useful to Wikipedia to have some serious 
competition. Just this week at work I was reviewing a competitor's new 
product, and it was both scary and thrilling, prodding us toward better 
work. It would be great for Wikipedia, and especially great for 
humanity, if somebody were actually nipping at our heels.

William

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[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for May 13

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.


As I mentioned last week, we are starting pre-rollout activities while 
we finish up the last bits of development. Now that the successful 
launch of the new enwiki UI is out of the way, we will be getting 
together with Rob H. and the rest of the ops ninjas to discuss release 
dates.

Also upcoming is a final pass at the terms and text, some more fiddling 
with cross-browser CSS and JavaScript issues, some work with the 
community to figure out the remaining details of the community side of 
the trial (keep an eye on RobLa's activity there), and a call for the 
nice people at the German Wikipedia to try our shiny new software with 
their config and make sure we haven't broken anything for them. 
(Regarding that, if some German speaker reading this would like to help 
set up the test site, we could use a hand. Contact me via direct email.)

The discussion of rollout means that we think the software is, some 
minor nits aside, basically ready. Want to be sure? You can test it out 
here, and we'll even give you admin rights [1] to do so:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_updates#2010_May_13


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William


[1] You know that you [2] have always wanted admin rights!

[2] Except those of you who already have them. But for you, we have a 
whole wiki that you can go wild on. You can even have a wheel war if you 
want and we won't tell a soul.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

[William Pietri]

On 05/13/2010 09:36 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>   During the
> Golden Age of Islam it was much more eclectic and
> permissively pluralistic than the Christian or Jewish
> cultures of the time [...]


Which reminds me of another interesting historical tidbit.

I was rummaging for story about Samuel Johnson and people hunting for 
naughty words in his dictionary, when I came across a Google Books 
reproduction of an 1896 periodical titled "The Homiletic Review", edited 
by I.K. Funk, of Funk and Wagnalls. It appears that a competitor to 
their dictionary culled the naughtiest bits from the Funk & Wagnalls 
Standard Dictionary, used those to claim they were filth-mongers, and 
set out to create a giant hullabaloo.

What I quote below is a spirited defense of recording all the words as 
they are used. In the original, it's followed by a page of quotes from 
"scholars, teachers, and editors" applauding a neutral, uncensored 
reference work.

It's funny to see how little has changed.


A VILE ATTACK ON THE STANDARD DICTIONARY.

A grave wrong is being perpetrated by a reprinter of one of the
English competitors of the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary,
assisted by some unscrupulous agents of other dictionaries—a wrong
that cannot be excused by the exigencies of commercial rivalry. As
is well known, in all unabridged dictionaries it is necessary to
give the definitions of certain indelicate words. Eighteen of these
words (selected out of a vocabulary of over 300,000 terms in the
Standard) have been collected and printed with their definitions by
the reprinter of this English dictionary, and circulars containing
them are being distributed among teachers, school trustees, and
parents all through this country, stirring up a filthy agitation
that will end, unless frowned down by the public press and other
leaders of public opinion, in setting people of prurient minds and
children everywhere to searching dictionaries for this class of
words. One of these publications contains such outrageously unjust
comments as the following:

"About two years ago the publishing house of Funk & Wagnalls
brought into the world a monstrosity entitled the Standard
Dictionary of the English Language."

"So far as relates to its collection of obscene, filthy,
blasphemous, slang, and profane words. It has no counterpart in
dictionaries of the English Language."


It is but fair to the press and scholars of England to say that the
English critics have in no way seconded this unfair assault, but are
unanimous in the most unqualified endorsement of the American work,
the standard Dictionary, expressing in many ways the same opinion as
that of the St. James's Budget [weekly edition of the St. James's
Gazette] London, which said:

" To say that it is perfect in form and scope is not
extravagance of praise, and to say that it is the most valuable
Dictionary of the English language is but to Repeat the obvious.
The Standard Dictionary should be the pride of literary America
as it Is the admiration of literary England."


The insincerity of this attack on the Standard is seen in the fact
that nearly every one of these 18 words is in the English work
published by this reprinter, and it contains other words so grossly
indelicate and withal so rarely used as to have been excluded from
the Standard and from nearly all the other dictionaries. Fifteen out
of the eighteen words (and others of the came class) are, and
properly so, in the Century Dictionary, and they are to be found,
with scarcely an exception, in every other reputable unabridged
dictionary, and this class of words is invariably recorded in the
leading dictionaries of all languages.

Since this attack was made, we have submitted to Charles A. Dana and
to a number of well-known educators the question whether we
committed an error in admitting into the Standard, as have other
dictionaries, this class of words. The answer has been without an
exception, "You did not."

The fact is, extraordinary care was used by the editors of the
Standard "to protect the language."

Of the more than 500,000 words collected by the hundreds of readers
employed to search all books of merit from Chaucer's time to the
present, over /300,000 were excluded wholly from the vocabulary/;
hence there was no need to pad the vocabulary. The rules of
exclusion and inclusion were most carefully made and rigidly
enforced. A most perplexing problem from beginning to end was how to
reduce the vocabulary, not how to enlarge it. Compression was
carried by many devices to the extremest degree. The editors who
passed upon the admission of words numbered over one hundred of the
best known writers and scholars In America and England. To accus

Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[William Pietri]

On 05/09/2010 05:36 AM, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>> At least by local community standards, the event depicted was indeed not
>> pornographic. San Francisco's long history as a home to both artists and
>> people with different takes on sex and gender means that a lot of local
>> art works with sex and gender as key themes. As they mention in their
>>  
> Just because someone says that their pornography is art doesn't make it so.
>

I never said otherwise. However, what I am saying in this case as 
somebody who lives in the neighborhood and walks past their gallery on 
the way to the store, their claims are entirely credible. By community 
standards, what they do is not obscene, and it is not pornographic.

As Wikipedia has it, porn is "portrayal of explicit sexual subject 
matter for the purposes of sexual excitement and erotic satisfaction."  
That means it is by definition impossible to judge whether an image is 
pornography without understanding the context in which it is made and 
consumed, because what distinguishes pornography is intent, not content.

As comparison, consider that it may be impossible to tell a frame from a 
horror movie from a crime scene photo or an illustration from a 
coroner's textbook or a medical reference. It is reasonable to argue 
that Wikipedia shouldn't host any horrific images, whatever the context. 
That's an argument about content. It's also reasonable to argue that we 
should only host horrific images where there's a clear educational 
purpose. That's an argument about intent.  But they are very different 
arguments.

People who are condemning particular images based on content alone with 
no information as to context of production or use are arguing for a 
standard based on obscenity, not pornography.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[William Pietri]

On 05/08/2010 10:23 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
> Editors are saying, with a straight face, that there is "no implied sexual 
> activity" in BDSM images like 
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angel_BDSM.png and that images like 
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BDSM_Preparation.png are not 
> pornographic.
>

I'm going to stay quite thoroughly out of 99.9% of this discussion, but 
that last link is from a well-known local art gallery and performance 
space, Femina Potens, [1]  that happens to be just a few blocks from my 
house.

At least by local community standards, the event depicted was indeed not 
pornographic. San Francisco's long history as a home to both artists and 
people with different takes on sex and gender means that a lot of local 
art works with sex and gender as key themes. As they mention in their 
mission statement [2]:

> Since 2003, Femina Potens organized almost 450 performing, visual, 
> literary, media arts, educational and public arts programs that have 
> authentically explored the experiences of queer, women, transgender 
> people and others living outside the female-male gender binary. [...]
> We provide the lgbtqik community with a comfortable and inviting 
> environment to engage and learn about all facets of art, sex and 
> gender through cutting edge art work, literature, and media that 
> explores one's gender, sexuality, social issues, wellness, creativity 
> and kink.

You'll note that the explicitly mention education, art, and learning. I 
have no reason to think they're anything other than sincere; if one 
wants to make porn in San Francisco, one doesn't have to go to all the 
trouble of creating a well-regarded non-profit art gallery.

I bring this up only because it's a good example of how easy it is to 
see something that's educational or artistic in nature as porn. I'm sure 
by some community standards it would be thought obscene, but hereabouts, 
that's just another day in The Castro. [3]

William


[1] http://www.feminapotens.org/
[2] http://www.feminapotens.org/index.php?Itemid=62
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castro

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Re: [Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia

[William Pietri]

On 05/06/2010 11:03 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> On 6 May 2010 19:00, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
>> The point is that this is an engine for virtual reality, while it is
>> MMORPG, too. And unlike Second Life, the platform is free software
>> which anyone would be able to install. Integrating Wikimedia projects
>> into this framework should be priority as in five to ten years, this
>> will be the most dominant form of using Internet.
>>  
> No, it won't. People have been saying that for years and the fact
> remains that a screen full of a text with a few relevant images is a
> much better way to convey information than VR.
>

If people will forgive me for promoting a personal project, this is 
exactly the kind of thoughtful disagreement about the future we want to 
put on record at the non-profit site Long Bets:

http://www.longbets.org/

Disagreements like this are turned into registered predictions, and then 
hopefully into bets. The wagered money ends up going to the winning 
bettor's designated charity, so both the Wikimedia Foundation and the 
Free Software Foundation could be eligible recipients.

If you folks are interested that, contact me off list and I'm glad to 
put you in touch with the right people at the Long Now Foundation.

William


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[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for May 6

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

The main news is that the team had a meeting this week with Danese and 
Erik to discuss rollout plans. Everybody concurs that we're close enough 
to launch to start a few release-related activities:

1) Starting a discussion with the enwiki community about how they'd like 
to handle the use of the feature once it's live,
2) Writing the release documentation,
3) Preparing for media interest,
4) Doing a final performance evaluation, and
5) Allocating engineering time to handle the rollout.

This will pull in a variety of people, all of whom we're excited to have 
involved, including Tim, Jay, Moka, Rob L., Rob H, and even Mike G. a 
bit. Adam has also offered us to help us solve some cross-browser CSS 
issues that have been confounding us, for which we are grateful. Keep an 
eye out for activity relating to these efforts in the coming days and weeks.

The actual release schedule depends on a number of factors, including 
the results of testing, the speed with which we resolve a couple of 
remaining UI difficulties, and the extent to which community testing on 
Labs turns up new issues.


Speaking of which, if you'd like to try out the current software, you 
can do so here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Lest you think it has achieved perfection, both Tango and Eper turned up 
interesting issues just this week. Thanks to them and the other testers!


To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_updates#2010_May_6


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

P.S. On a personal note, after a dozen years of consulting, I've decided 
to join an early-stage web startup. Post launch, once things are running 
approximately smoothly, I'll be handing off my duties to Rob Lanphier, 
aka User:RobLa. I would ask everybody to be nice to him so I can safely 
make my escape, but there's no need; he's been around this place since 
2001. But you should still be nice to him because he's a good guy who 
loves Wikipedia.

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Re: [Foundation-l] How to make unstoppable petty complaint a feature?

[William Pietri]

Thanks for bringing this up, David.

On 05/05/2010 07:31 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> No matter how much work is put into flagged revisions on en:wp, it is
> 100% certain that it will be greeted with deafening whinging.
>
> This is not a reason not to make it as good as possible, but the
> complaint is a certainty. Anyone who's been around Wikipedia or
> Wikimedia long enough can see this is what will happen. There is no
> change that will not be greeted with complaint, significant or petty.
>
> 1. Is this a bug or a feature?
> 2. If it isn't a feature, how can we make it into one? 'Cos we really need to.
>

I'm insanely busy with non-Wikipedia stuff for the next couple days, and 
hope to come back to this more later. But even as a person fully 
expecting to be the target for a lot of the grumbling, I wanted to come 
out in favor of the complaining, or at least some of it.

Good software development is a dialog between the makers and the users. 
Through use and discussion, we jointly learn what the product should be. 
The future is not generally foreseeable, but we can at least react as 
swiftly and smartly as possible to new learning as it comes in. This is 
only possible with an engaged audience, and for better or worse, people 
are much more likely to speak up when they see a problem than when they 
are happy.

What I'd love is a way to foreground the reasonable, thoughtful, and 
actionable complaints, while attenuating the other ones. Productive 
complaints tend to be specific, personal, actual (as opposed to 
hypothetical), limited in scope, future-oriented, practical, and aware 
of the situation. E.g., "When I do X, I have problem Y that could be 
fixed in way Z." Or, "When I observe a novice user doing A, they are 
confused about B, and we could make it clearer in way C, but there's a 
risk we will impact people in situation D."

Having no time machine, the FlaggedRevs team can't do anything about the 
past, but we're very eager to improve the future, and clear, actionable 
community feedback is vital for that.

How to achieve that, I dunno, but we do have a lot of collective talent 
in creating, cataloging, and filtering information in ways that are 
useful to readers, so it seems like we have a lot to work with. And 
perhaps the complaining can be even put to use; is there some way to get 
people to complain about bad complaints?

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Flagged protection and patrolled revisions

[William Pietri]

These are great questions, and we're actually having a big meeting about 
the project this afternoon, so I'll be sure to raise them to make sure 
we all have the same notion. That said, a few of quick responses from my 
perspective:

On 05/03/2010 08:15 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
> Since it does seem very close to going live, could I ask if plans have
> been made for how to handle announcing the arrival of this feature and
> any post-implementation problems? Hopefully there won't be any or
> many, but are there plans ranging from "rollback completely if things
> go awfully wrong" to "make adjustments as needed and be responsive to
> concerns raised"?
>

There's the technical part of this and the community part of this. My 
understanding is that the technical side of the rollout is well 
understood, and that our substantial time in the labs environment means 
we are not expecting major problems. I also am given to believe that if 
there are major problems, rolling back will not be a big deal.

That will get us to having the feature enabled, but not in use. That 
next leg is mainly up to the community. Once the software is enabled, 
any admin will be able to turn on flagged protection for any page, just 
as they are now able to turn on full protection. I expect there will be 
a period of experimentation and vigorous discussion to discover exactly 
when that is a good idea.

Once it's in use on particular pages, there's the question of who does 
the reviewing, how much is needed, and how we make sure it gets done in 
a timely fashion. Most of that is up to the community as well, and part 
of the purpose of this experiment is to figure that out as well. From a 
technical perspective, there are a couple different approaches to 
deciding who has reviewer powers; in the next week or so I want to start 
a community discussion on the right model, but we need a little more 
internal discussion to be able to clearly present those options.

As far as the "making adjustments as needed", the plan is that we will 
absolutely learn things after release, and some of those things will 
probably require code changes. There is also a list of nice-to-haves 
that we can do if nothing else more pressing comes up. So work will 
continue as before, with frequent releases either to production or to 
the labs environment as appropriate. Once that work tapers off, I'm sure 
there will be a discussion of where best to allocate resources, but that 
hasn't even been mentioned yet; the Foundation is definitely committed 
to supporting this experiment.

> And how much input exactly will ordinary editors have
> post-implementation? Is the interface flexible and can be changed by
> editors or admins, and which bits can only be tweaked by developers
> (either using common sense or following a community poll or Bugzilla
> request or request somewhere else)? I ask this partly as someone who
> (with others) may have to deal with any massive disputes or edit wars
> that break out over this if some aspects of flagged revisions or its
> interface are editable and changeable on-wiki (presumably in the
> Mediawiki namespace, editable by admins only).
>

This is an area where I'm personally a bit ignorant, so I'll be sure to 
ask. I know that some parts of the interface definitely require a 
developer to change code and release it. I know that some, possibly all 
purely textual changes can in theory be done hot, but I don't know who 
has the mojo to do that on the English Wikipedia. If somebody here knows 
that, please speak up.


> Presumably, an update will be made to the on-wiki pages about this
> before it goes live? And there will some site notice giving some
> warning? having things change mid-edit could be a bit disconcerting!
>

My belief, which I will double-check, is that releasing the software 
will have little or no impact on the editing experience; it's only when 
an admin activates it on a particular page via the protection interface 
that the editing experience will change.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 29

[William Pietri]

On 04/30/2010 05:37 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> On 1 May 2010 01:32, William Pietri  wrote:
>
>> You should keep in mind that it definitely takes me more time and more
>> energy to deal with non-nice requests.
>>  
> Really? How does me adding more words to my emails save you time?
>

It's not the quantity of words, but the choice of them.

When I am dealing with a polite message, I can write a quick reply. With 
a prickly one, I have to do more drafts, so I can get past my first 
reaction, a mainly negative one, and produce something positive in tone 
and substance. I also need more time between messages, so that my 
irritation in one doesn't slop over onto some undeserving correspondent.

As long as we're on the topic of etiquette, I find it frustrating when 
people pick out one particular bit to reply to and ignore the broader 
point. I add that only because I'm not sure if this was part of your 
intentional policy against niceness, or a more accidental sort.

Hoping that is useful,

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 29

[William Pietri]

On 04/30/2010 05:19 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> I'm intrigued by the notion that you don't have to be nice to people
>> >  that are paid to deal with you. Since I gave the foundation a 70%
>> >  discount from my normal rates, perhaps you can shoot for a mix of 70%
>> >  courtesy and 30% head-biting?
>>  
> I don't do "nice", to staff or volunteers. I make the point that I
> feel needs to be made. This does tend to annoy a lot of people, but
> despite that a large number of people actively choose to work with me
> because they realise that my approach gets good results.
>

Ok. For what it's worth, I think you're creating a false dichotomy; the 
making of a point and the grace with which it's made are, in my 
experience, mostly unrelated. But that's your problem, not mine.

You should keep in mind that it definitely takes me more time and more 
energy to deal with non-nice requests. It's like that for most 
consultants I know. So your preferred working style costs the foundation 
more and makes it a bit less likely that people with other options will 
choose to work with the foundation. The more community members eschew 
politeness, the stronger the effect.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 29

[William Pietri]

On 04/30/2010 04:55 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> You thanked Thomas three times in that e-mail. If I may say so, such
>> courtesy is unwarranted, in light of the terseness of his most recent
>> post. We're all volunteers, so colour me confused as to why people
>> think head-biting will achieve anything.
>>  
> My understanding is that William is being paid.
>


I'm intrigued by the notion that you don't have to be nice to people 
that are paid to deal with you. Since I gave the foundation a 70% 
discount from my normal rates, perhaps you can shoot for a mix of 70% 
courtesy and 30% head-biting?

Thanks,

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 29

[William Pietri]

On 04/30/2010 03:28 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> On 29 April 2010 22:24, William Pietri  wrote:
>
>> As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
>>
>>
>> We continue to work on UI display issues and on getting up a Labs
>> version of the German Wikipedia. We're pretty close to release, and we
>> believe only minor UI issues remain.
>>  
> You are nowhere near ready for release. I reported several significant
> problems here:
>
> http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:FlaggedRevs_issues#Reviewing_edits
>
> None of them has been fixed and you haven't replied to my bug report
> with any reasons for not fixing them.
>
> You have been commenting that people have been reporting fewer and
> fewer problems; what do you expect if you completely ignore the ones
> people have already reported?
>


Hi. Thanks for the comment.

Just to be clear, we didn't completely ignore that comment, or any 
other; we've been going through the comments on phone meetings every 
week. We did, however, fail to respond to that one, which I'm sorry for. 
I'll make sure to bring these up next we talk. Going back through, out 
of 26 comments, I see 3 that didn't get replies, so I'll be sure to get 
those, too. Thanks.

So i can be sure I understand, when you say "nowhere near ready for 
release", are you referring just to those 3 issues? I believe the 
question of speed there has mainly to do with labs, rather than Flagged 
Revs itself, and the other 2 points you mention are suggested UI 
improvements. From your phrasing, I take it you believe those UI changes 
are important enough to delay release?

Thanks,

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Flagged Protection update for April 29

[William Pietri]

On 04/29/2010 06:32 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
> William Pietri wrote:
>
>> As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
>>
>>
>> We continue to work on UI display issues and on getting up a Labs
>> version of the German Wikipedia. We're pretty close to release, and we
>> believe only minor UI issues remain.
>>  
> Between this update and the last one, the only commits made to the
> FlaggedRevs extension were localisation updates imported from
> translatewiki.net. But your language here implies that something
> actually happened this week. Could you perhaps be more specific as to
> what sort of work was done?
>

Sure. The resolution to the apparent paradox is that not all useful work 
immediately results in commits. In particular, the major UI issue being 
worked on can be seen on this page:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Vince_%282005%29

In the upper right, you'll note a lock icon with (+) next to it. The UI 
mavens involved, Howie and Parul, feel that the current version isn't 
consistent with the direction the usability team has for the interface, 
so they're trying to come up with something that looks and works better. 
However, getting something that satisfies them and also looks and works 
properly in all browsers has been a challenge. I understand the 
Usability Initiative developers have offered technical assistance with that.

This is pretty typical pre-release fit-and-finish stuff. I know it can 
be frustrating for project stakeholders, as it appears like not much is 
happening, but given the scale at which Wikipedia works and the 
importance of this project being well received, I think we're better off 
taking a bit longer for a solid user experience, especially the bit that 
appears on article pages.

I know some additional work was done on cleaning up names, labels, and 
text in the interface; if you're curious about exactly what went on, I 
can ask. My understanding is that is almost done, though.

William

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[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 29

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.


We continue to work on UI display issues and on getting up a Labs 
version of the German Wikipedia. We're pretty close to release, and we 
believe only minor UI issues remain.

If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see the in-progress and upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, 
under Current and Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

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[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 22

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

Now recovered from the developer meeting, we have made further progress, 
and have only a few known issues between us and release.

If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_updates#2010_Apr_22


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker,  under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


We are very close now; only a few UI issues remain between us and final 
testing, after which will hopefully come a launch on the English Wikipedia.

We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

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[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 15

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

Thanks to the developer meetup in Germany and mid-term exams for Aaron, 
there has been no significant change since last week. However, the lack 
of new requests suggests we're pretty close to something releasable.

If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker,  under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157

We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia

William

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[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 8

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

More progress has been made, and new requests have tapered off 
substantially, which suggests that a release is within reach.

If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_updates#2010_Apr_8


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker,  under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


The backlog was relatively stable again this week, so we are definitely 
moving closer to launch.

We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Weekly Flagged Protection update

[William Pietri]

On 04/01/2010 09:09 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
> Thank you for the weekly reports, both on this list and on the labs wiki.
> They're very helpful in a number of ways.
>

You're very welcome.


>> Feedback from users has dropped off, which we are taking as a sign that
>> people are relatively happy with things.
>>  
> Err, can you explain this logic to me?
>

Since what people mainly report is things they are unhappy with, we take 
the reduction in volume to be a sign of decreased unhappiness. It could 
be total apathy, of course, but that hasn't been one of the problems 
with this project so far.

If people do have concerns with the current implementation, now is the 
time to express them, so that we can get fixes in our work queue and 
triage them appropriately. The place to start for that is here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


>> We expect to release again next week, and each week thereafter until
>> this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
>>  
> Just for clarification, "release" means updating the software being run on
> the labs site?
>


Yes, exactly.

William

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[Foundation-l] Weekly Flagged Protection update

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

Feedback from users has dropped off, which we are taking as a sign that 
people are relatively happy with things.

If that's not the case, or if you'd like to test it for yourself, start 
here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_updates#2010_Apr_1


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker,  under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


The backlog was relatively stable this week, so we are definitely moving 
closer to launch.

We expect to release again next week, and each week thereafter until 
this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

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[Foundation-l] Weekly Flagged Protection update

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

This week we've seen a lot of helpful testing from at least 15 people, 
and we'd love to see more before launch.

To participate, start here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_updates#2010_Mar_25


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker,  under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157

There will likely be more work than that before launch as user feedback 
comes in; we just added a number of items based on tester feedback.  But 
if this week's feedback is any guide, we don't appear to have much major 
work remaining.

We expect to release again next week, and each week thereafter until 
this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [WikiEN-l] Flagged Protection: ready for more testing

[William Pietri]

On 03/22/2010 08:59 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> For those not reading WikiEN-l that actually want the forwarded
> message to be included. ;)
>

Thanks Cary and Thomas!

Per David's suggestion, I'll be posting weekly updates on WikiEN-L and 
the Village Pump. It seemed to noisy to post those here as well but if 
people would prefer that, I'm glad to.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity

[William Pietri]

On 03/19/2010 08:06 AM, Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
> I must respectfully disagree with your belief that we need stronger global 
> blocking. Each community should set its own behavior standards, not have them 
> imposed from above. Just because we consider a person a troll on one project 
> does not automatically make them a troll on other projects.
>

Global blocking doesn't require imposition from above. It could be done 
cooperatively, without any community ceding jurisdiction.

A few examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition


William

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Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevisions status (March 2010)

[William Pietri]

On 03/04/2010 01:45 PM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
> Why did it take this request from enwiki to have the UX aspect of
> flagged revisions taken seriously?
>
> This has been one of the main complaints about the implementation since
> day zero. All other complaints I've heard have been regarding the idea,
> not the implementation. The UX problems are real, yet were unaddressed
> until very recently. Why? Will the Foundation be expending effort on
> this using the now-permanent UX team?
>

This is history of which I'm partly ignorant, but I don't think there's 
anything specific about the enwiki request that triggered the user 
experience improvements.

I think MediaWiki coders -- like developers everywhere -- have 
consistently built things with the best interfaces they knew how to 
make. The difference is that now there are people with strong UX 
backgrounds on staff and available to help, which means better results.

So I'd say that the UX improvements underway for Flagged Revisions are 
already a sign of what you're looking for: the Foundation's desire to 
use the UX team more broadly to make everything better.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevisions status (March 2010)

[William Pietri]

On 03/04/2010 10:57 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Purely as a point of fact it is simply inaccurate that the
> 20 implementations of flagged revs and patrolled edits
> across the other wikies than English Wikipedia are
> monolithically identical. I know this firsthand.
>

Sorry if I gave that impression. Indeed, I have direct evidence 
otherwise. When I run low on things to worry about, I pull up the 
spreadsheet I built showing the wide config variations in uses of 
FlaggedRevs. Not that it's worrying on its own; it's nice to see people 
using it and adapting it locally. It just means that potential bugs are 
harder to spot.

All I was trying to say is that the requested approach for the English 
Wikipedia, called Flagged Protection,  differs from the existing uses.

For those unfamiliar, Flagged Protection is described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevisions status (March 2010)

[William Pietri]

On 03/04/2010 09:59 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> William has mentioned there are software checkins, etc. in progress.
> Even a list of those would be excellent stuff.
>

This appears to be the best source:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/aaron

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevisions status (March 2010)

[William Pietri]

On 03/04/2010 09:20 AM, MZMcBride wrote:
> William Pietri wrote:
>
>> Instead, I think the right approach is to put new software out there
>> frequently, so people can try it out for themselves and form their own
>> opinions of how close we are. Eventually, both the builders and the
>> community will agree that there's something worth shipping. And in the
>> meantime, the discussion that goes on will improve the product in ways
>> that no mere look at the calendar ever could.
>>  
> What does this paragraph say about the 20 or so Wikimedia wikis that are
> already using FlaggedRevs?
>

Nothing, really. But what I'd say in response to the question I imagine 
you're really asking: the English Wikipedia community has asked for 
something different than the other 20 wikis. And even for the areas the 
software is the same, we think there are some interface changes are 
going to improve both the user experience and the value of the enwiki 
trial.

> Also, David Gerard made a suggestion about weekly updates that concretely
> list the progress that's being made with regard to FlaggedRevs development.
> What can be done to see that idea implemented as soon as possible?
>

I'm going to take that as an endorsement of the suggestion. I like the 
idea of it myself, but I haven't answered yet because there's a problem 
I'm struggling with. Maybe folks here can come up with a solution that 
has so far escaped me.

Part of my role as a project manager is maximizing long-term 
productivity, which requires me to protect the people actually doing the 
work from external disruption. My fear is that if I give any sort of 
detailed report, that will expose any named person to needless drama, 
abusive language, hostile tone, and accusations of malfeasance, 
corruption, incompetence, and/or low morals -- all problems amply 
demonstrated on this very list. That would have a terrible, terrible 
impact on productivity, team morale, and the ability to attract more 
people to get involved.

So my current thinking is that I should focus all my energy now on 
getting us to where we can release publicly every couple of weeks, and 
do most of the regular communication as release notes. That would put 
the focus on the software, where I think it belongs. But if somebody has 
a plan they think better, I'm glad to discuss it.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Building up the reserves

[William Pietri]

On 03/03/2010 06:41 PM, Veronique Kessler wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The question of what is the right reserve amount is a common one.  I've
> hear of ranges from 0 to 3 months to 3 years.  I agree that one year is
> a good measure and that could be increased or decreased depending on a
> variety of circumstances both internal and external. [...]
>

Thanks for the reply, Veronique.

Do you have an opinion on building up an endowment to cover core 
operating costs? I know zero about non-profit finance, but it would be 
comforting to me to know that, even in worst-case scenarios, the servers 
would stay up and bits would continue to flow.

Don't get me wrong: a full year of reserve seems great to me. But in my 
head Wikipedia is for the ages, and a financial model that matches that 
-- at least for the very basics -- would be reassuring.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevisions status (March 2010)

[William Pietri]

Hi, Stephen. Thanks for making your point in a polite, low-drama way.

On 03/04/2010 05:58 AM, Stephen Bain wrote:
>> The answer is already given ... When it is done. You have been informed with
>> >  the latest developments.. so you know the existing issues.
>>  
> That's normally the perfect answer, but the point of this discussion
> is that it's not unreasonable to expect something more concrete when
> there are people getting paid to do the work.
>

I think the real problem here is not the lack of a date for when it will 
be done. It's that progress isn't sufficiently transparent -- something 
that also frustrates me and something we are actively working on solving.

Right now people can see code being committed, and they can see items 
being checked off. But for most people, that's effectively meaningless; 
it gives them no familiar, intuitive way to judge progress. So they fall 
back to dates, which they do have experience in judging, and deadlines, 
which give the comforting illusion of surety. [1]

Instead, I think the right approach is to put new software out there 
frequently, so people can try it out for themselves and form their own 
opinions of how close we are. Eventually, both the builders and the 
community will agree that there's something worth shipping. And in the 
meantime, the discussion that goes on will improve the product in ways 
that no mere look at the calendar ever could.


So yes, all parties are in favor of something more concrete, and as soon 
as possible. We're working on it. We would already have it, except that 
I underestimated both the issues involved in releasing to labs and the 
difficulty of quickly setting up new production-equivalent test 
environments. That's hard for the same reasons of historical 
underinvestment that until recently held Wikipedia's UI back.

And to address an occasional theme in both the on- and off-list mail 
I've received: I believe there are no bad actors or sinister plans 
keeping this from happening. If I did, I'd raise a ruckus, quit, or 
both: I've got better things to do than go-nowhere projects. This is 
happening. We are making good progress, progress that we want to show to 
you, and we will do that as soon as we can.

William


[1] There are a lot of reasons I think the deadline model is 
pathological for software projects. Having spent a decade understanding 
why and learning more effective approaches, I have a lot to say on the 
topic -- too much for this list, I think. But if people want to discuss 
that off-list, please do drop me a line. In the world of print, 
McConnell's "Rapid Development" ch. 8 and 9 has a very readable 
explanation of the problems. Poppendieck's "Lean Software Development" 
and Cohn's "Agile Estimating and Planning" are good places to start for 
the modern solutions. Caspers Jones also has some great material on 
deadline failure rates, but I don't have refs handy.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?

[William Pietri]

On 02/28/2010 10:24 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> On 28 February 2010 22:17, Brian J Mingus  wrote:
>
>> I run a mediawiki farm with mediawiki trunk installed. I've got the process
>> of setting up new wikis scripted and can set one up in 30 seconds. If you
>> just need a place to install a wiki you should be able to find one no
>> problem. Also, WMF has a whack of servers. You should have absolutely no
>> problem getting one in short order. Particularly for a "high priority"
>> project. My 2 cents.
>>  
> The problem isn't getting a wiki running, it's getting a wiki running
> in a way comparable to English Wikipedia, which is far from a default
> Mediawiki install. Given that these are the people that actually keep
> the enwiki servers running, I wouldn't expect it to take them this
> long, though...
>

Yes. I was also expecting it to be easy. Heck, we had flaggedrevs.labs 
up already, so how hard could an update be? Which is why in the blog 
post I was sunny about having something visible soon.

But for abstruse reasons, not all of which I understand personally, it 
turned out that it was not easy. It sounds like the reasons are mainly 
historical, though. Regardless, I have full faith that the people 
keeping the servers running are prioritizing this work highly, although 
-- correctly -- not as highly as keeping the existing stuff from blowing 
up. I really want FlaggedRevs deployed on enwiki, but I also want there 
to be an enwiki to deploy to.


Sleep beckons, so I'm going to give up on this thread for the night, and 
the next couple of days are heavily booked. But if people have more 
questions, please do post them; if nobody else gets to them first, I will.

And in the future people want to know about something, just drop me a 
note off list and say, "Hey, William! I was wondering about X, and I'd 
bet other people are too." I'm entirely happy to keep people apprised on 
pretty much anything, but I don't want to gratuitously spam the inboxes 
of the eight zillion busy people on these lists until I have something 
useful to announce.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] William Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?

[William Pietri]

On 02/28/2010 09:36 PM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
> On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, William Pietri wrote:
>
>> I've reported when I thought I had something to report
>>  
> I think the problem here is that you haven't reported any
> accomplishments because there haven't been any.
>

We've got some stuff that is probably done. But we can't actually show 
it, and we can't prove that it's done, so yes, giving people a progress 
report saying "things are probably better now but you can't see" didn't 
seem so helpful.

When I put up the last blog post, we did have something accomplished: a 
clear list of all the things we knew were necessary to release, with 
relative estimates, and posted in a public place so others could keep 
track of the status and let us know if they thought we missed anything. 
We've since worked on them, and I promise that as soon as we have 
something to show, which I would very much like to be soon, I'll let 
everybody know.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?

[William Pietri]

On 02/28/2010 09:27 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> On 28 February 2010 21:05, William Pietri  wrote:
>
>> As to who I'm responsible to, that was Erik Moeller and is becoming
>> Danese Cooper. We of course have a plan, which is publicly posted, and
>> which I'm glad to answer questions on. Elsewhere in this thread (and in
>> the blog post) I've explained why I haven't just made up an arbitrary
>> deadline, but am instead trying to measure productivity and project a
>> date. If you have further questions on this, let me know.
>>  
> You've been working on it for months. Surely you and your team have
> produced something in that time. Look at how much it is, compare it to
> how much you think needs to be done (working out what needed to be
> done was the first thing you did, yes?), do a bit of multiplication,
> and give us your projected finish date. You shouldn't be "trying to
> measure productivity", you should just be measuring it.
>

That's an entirely reasonable approach, but there are two wrinkles.

One, I underestimated the difficulty of releasing to a production-like 
environment. And until we have done that, we can't tell the difference 
between the things we hope are done and the things that are actually 
done. I intend to only measure the latter; measuring the former as if 
they were done is chancy.  I am pressing vigorously for us to be able to 
do that soon, but there's only so much pressing you can do without 
long-term harm.

Two, most software projects are inevitably exploratory. The difference 
between what we think we need and what we actually ended up needing is 
often large. So I could project dates based on all of the needs that we 
have discovered, and then somebody in the community will look at the 
software and say, "Hey, what about X?" And X will be some entirely 
reasonable thing that it is now obvious that we need. So I think it's 
better to release early and often and be open about the fact that it 
won't be really done until everybody (or, y'know, enough of everybody) 
agrees that we're now really done, or at least feel comfortable 
projecting that we're done.

But if you'd like to make your own projections, all the data for the 
development work is exportable from Pivotal Tracker. If I thought I 
could take that data, or any other data, and give people a real date, 
one that they could have confidence in, I would be ecstatic to do so. 
But I can't, and I won't just give a BS date to get everybody off my back.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?

[William Pietri]

On 02/28/2010 08:59 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
> I finally figured out that the "view history" button in Pivotal Tracker is
> where all the relevant details are. For each of the items I'm looking at,
> Aaron appears to have completed them "2 months ago." But they're not marked
> as finished because you and Howie haven't done so? What's the hold-up
> exactly?
>

Sorry, I thought I explained this earlier: deploying to somewhere that 
people can see is the current holdup. I believe that something isn't 
actually done until it's has been tested in an environment sufficiently 
like production that you have reasonable confidence that it will work.



>> My point is that drama will slow things down, not speed things up. My
>> long experience is that people swearing at programmers impedes progress.
>> You should decide which you're after. I figure it's progress, which is
>> why I mentioned it.
>>  
> Are you a programmer? The programmers seem to be the ones who have done
> their jobs here. This isn't a development issue by the looks of it, it's a
> management issue. And I'm "swearing" at the management (see e-mail subject
> line).
>

I have not noticed that swearing at other people noticeably improves 
their performance either, but I am specifically concerned that the team 
members will be affected by your tone, whether or not you mean it for 
any specific individual.

If you'd like to swear at me specifically, fine, whatever, but please do 
it off list. In public, and specifically when people who are working 
hard might take it amiss, I ask you to speak politely and 
professionally. Team morale is important to team productivity.



> I watch a live feed of every edit and action to the FlaggedRevisions labs
> site  and I've been the one doing the
> admin promotions on there since September 2009.
>
> Can you point to where you're seeing this feedback you're talking about?
>

Off the top of my head, direct email, plus these pages:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Bug_reports_and_enhancement_requests
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page

Plus various direct communication from Erik when I joined the project 
about the current state of things. And whatever else Howie dug up as he 
looked into improving the interfaces.


>> The usability team and I agreed with that, as did others, which is what
>> motivated this latest round of changes.
>>  
> Where are the comments from the Usability team?
>

We get together and talk. In the WMF office, mainly. It's faster.

> Who exactly is working on these user interface issues? What are they doing?
> I'm curious.
>

Howie, Aaron, and Parul all worked on that. The visual design is done 
and, I believe, implemented. There are some language changes going on now.

> And shouldn't I be able to see all of this Usability work at your Pivotal
> Tracker? I don't.
>


No. The only thing we care about in the end is delivered software, so 
that's all Pivotal Tracker tracks. Upstream artifacts are tracked via 
email and verbally.

>> As soon as we can release to labs and check out the new stuff, which I
>> ardently hope is soon, we'll have some useful data on productivity.
>>  
> You "ardently hope"? Aren't you the person in charge of this project?
>

Sort of. Project manager means I'm responsible for pushing it through, 
not that I'm particularly in charge of it. In my view, the community's 
ultimately in charge.

I expected things to be released before this point, and indeed I 
previously expected to be able to release on the current Labs site 
without issue. Having been surprised before, I hope but do not yet plan 
that I won't be surprised again. I could make up dates, or I could press 
other people to make up dates and give them to you, but I believe that 
to be the sort of BS project management that gets a lot of perfectly 
fine projects into needles hot water.

When I have enough data to give everybody a date I have some confidence 
in, I'll do it. But given that speed is the primary driver here, I'm not 
going to increase the workload of already busy people, thereby delaying 
the project, just to create dates whose value is questionable.

> Unlike the impediments you've been throwing up in this thread and that
> others have been throwing up over the past months and years? Originally it
> was getting the software mostly finished. That happened, and Erik announced
> that any project could request FlaggedRevisions. Then it became an issue of
> user interface (and oh-my-god usability). Then a hardware issue (though that
> turned out to be mostly, if not completely, bunk). I wonder what the next
> boogeyman will be. Perhaps http://bit.ly/djkLDa ?
>


I don't appreciate the implication that I'm somehow trying to block this 
project, or that there's some grand conspiracy to block it. I want to 
get it done. Everybody involved wants to get it done. None of us 
benefits by not ge

Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?

[William Pietri]

On 02/28/2010 08:43 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> On 28 February 2010 20:24, William Pietri  wrote:
>
>> Menacing people like that with "consequences" mainly serves to destroy
>> motivation, not create it, so if you're truly interested in getting this
>> done, I ask you not to do that again.
>>  
> Nobody has done any menacing. He asked what the consequences would be,
> he didn't threaten consequences. (That there will be consequences if
> you don't do your job should go without saying. Those consequences
> will come from your boss, not the community, though.)
>

Well, in my experience, when somebody starts out with "what the fuck" 
and ends up talking about consequences, it is rarely a purely academic 
inquiry into organizational practices. But if I read it wrong, I'd be 
glad to apologize.

I think the people working on this (Aaron and Howie in particular) are 
both talented and hardworking, so I feel protective of them. I'd like 
them to spend a long time working for the Wikimedia Foundation, and 
anything that might push against that is going to rile me up some.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?

[William Pietri]

Hi, Alex. Good questions.

On 02/28/2010 08:10 PM, Alex wrote:
>> >  When might that be? Is there a specific deadline? If not, why? And if 
>> > there
>> >  is a deadline and it slips by yet again, what's the consequence to those
>> >  running the project?
>> >  
>>  
> I second this. Are William and Howie just under contract indefinitely
> until FlaggedRevs is finally "ready"? Who are they responsible to, and
> why is that person apparently not giving them any sort of priorities
> (like, creating a plan or a deadline)?
>

As to who I'm responsible to, that was Erik Moeller and is becoming 
Danese Cooper. We of course have a plan, which is publicly posted, and 
which I'm glad to answer questions on. Elsewhere in this thread (and in 
the blog post) I've explained why I haven't just made up an arbitrary 
deadline, but am instead trying to measure productivity and project a 
date. If you have further questions on this, let me know.

Regarding incentives, I believe that this project borrowed Howie part 
time from the Usability Team, who will welcome having him back when 
we're done. For my part, I certainly have an reason to get this done 
soon. Like everybody, I thought this would go quicker, and I gave WMF a 
70% discount from my normal rate, because heck, I love Wikipedia. But 
each week this goes on means a slightly larger hole in my 2010 revenue 
picture. A worthwhile one, to be sure, but I'd still like to keep it as 
small as possible.

> Why is there such little transparency in this whole process? Rather than
> use the normal bug tracker that all other MediaWiki developers use and
> that the community is used to, they're using some entirely separate one,
> hosted on a 3rd party website.

See my explanation elsewhere in the thread, but basically, I'm not 
tracking bugs, and Bugzilla is a poor fit for the approach I thought 
best. I used the fastest-to-use tool that suits that approach, so as to 
maximize the time spent on actual work. Nobody has mentioned an issue 
with it until now. If people would rather I also tracked a bunch of 
tickets in Bugzilla we can talk about that, and I'm eager to hear other 
suggestions for ways to increase transparency.

> As far as I can tell, there's only been
> one unprompted communication with the community regarding this - the
> techblog post in January that had little new information.
>

I've reported when I thought I had something to report, and I've 
certainly answered direct questions from people. I'm definitely planning 
to announce boldly when we actually have something to show, and I'll do 
that far and wide.

Although I considered it, it didn't seem useful to send out a "hey, 
still working" update in the meantime. Partly because there's not a 
great venue for it, and partly because the subsequent roiling of the 
waters takes up time and energy I'd rather see productively used. But 
mainly because it's hard to do that without throwing under the bus 
whatever person or group is currently the bottleneck. And not only is 
that unfair, but it's terrible for both morale and productivity, so it 
seemed like waiting for a labs update was the best option.

I'm open to suggestions, though, so definitely drop me a line (perhaps 
off list?) if you want to discuss something.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?

[William Pietri]

On 02/28/2010 07:32 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
> When it's your biography that reads you once were convicted of murder or
> pedophilia or whatever else, then you can start talking about people being
> wound too tight. When it's only been a delay of a few weeks, then you can
> talk about which forum should be used and so forth.
>

There's no need to persuade me of the value of Flagged Revisions. I 
already think the project is important, or I wouldn't be working on it.

My point is that drama will slow things down, not speed things up. My 
long experience is that people swearing at programmers impedes progress. 
You should decide which you're after. I figure it's progress, which is 
why I mentioned it.


> What I see is literally zero activity on that site since December 17, 2009.
> All of the tasks appear to have been created on December 16 or 17 and nearly
> all of them are in the "Deliver" phase, which reads to me as though they
> haven't been done.
>
> I did get the software to output "Found 32 stories (93 points total, 0
> points completed)" for the user JAS and the "Done" button at the top opened
> an empty box.
>
> Point to me what I'm missing.
>

Seeing a "Deliver" button means that Aaron, the developer, thinks the 
item is done, but it is not yet visible to others. Once we have a test 
server where people can look at things, then they are delivered. When 
some non-developer (e.g., me, or Howie Fung of the usability team) 
verifies that they are actually done, only then do we mark them as done.


> Production wikis like... the German Wikipedia? What the hell are you talking
> about? Update flaggedrevs.php for the enwiki database, sync it to the
> servers, and let's see what happens. How does that sound?
>

Like a recipe for breaking one of the world's top ten websites, an 
outcome I would rather avoid.

There have been substantial changes to the code. We don't want to break 
either the English or German Wikipedias, so we test before shipping. 
This is not an unusual approach to running a production web site. 
"Measure twice, cut once," works even better in software than carpentry.

Also, the community doesn't yet believe the software is ready, at least 
judging by the last round of feedback on the labs site. The usability 
team and I agreed with that, as did others, which is what motivated this 
latest round of changes.

As important as it is to get FlaggedRevs out for the community to try, I 
think it's even more important to release it in a form that will yield a 
successful trial. If we release something that's not up to snuff, the 
community may reject it for reasons that have nothing to do with the 
actual idea, an outcome nobody wants.


> When might that be? Is there a specific deadline? If not, why? And if there
> is a deadline and it slips by yet again, what's the consequence to those
> running the project?
>

There is no specific deadline. The approach I thought best for this 
project was one where we measure actual progress and use that to project 
dates. (That's why I used Pivotal Tracker, a tool designed for tracking 
and measuring real, fine-grained progress.) I explain more here:

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/flagged-revisions-your-questions-answered/

It's a pretty standard approach in any of the [[Agile Software 
Development]] processes.

As soon as we can release to labs and check out the new stuff, which I 
ardently hope is soon, we'll have some useful data on productivity. If 
everybody feels the new version is ready to go live, then I am not aware 
of any impediment to public release right after that decision. If, as 
seems likely, there are some further proposed changes, we'll be able to 
estimate development time and project dates.

As to consequences, we all serve at the pleasure of Danese Cooper most 
directly, and to Erik, Sue, and the board from there, so if they think 
we're doing a bad job I'm sure they'll deal with that.

However, in my experience everybody involved is smart, talented, and 
very committed to the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation. Everybody is 
also keenly aware that this is a high-profile, high-priority project. 
Menacing people like that with "consequences" mainly serves to destroy 
motivation, not create it, so if you're truly interested in getting this 
done, I ask you not to do that again.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?

[William Pietri]

On 02/28/2010 03:26 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
> It's a simple question: what the fuck is the hold-up for FlaggedRevisions on
> the English Wikipedia?
>

If people have questions like this, I'd encourage them to drop me a note 
before they get to the swearing-in-frustration stage. I try to check my 
talk page at least daily, and I must check my email 20 times a day. 
There's no benefit to getting wound up; surplus angst does not help 
either the coding or the communicating about it.

As I mentioned in the blog post, you can follow the software development 
progress in detail here:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157

As you can see, we have a bunch of completed changes that need to be 
deployed to an environment where we can get real feedback on them. Once 
we get the feedback from the community, we'll have a better idea of how 
close we are to releasing to the English Wikipedia.

The thing we're working on right now is moving flaggedrevs.labs to 
different hardware. That site is currently running on the production 
cluster, and we can't release new test versions of the software there 
without risk of trouble for production wikis using FlaggedRevs.

Rob Halsell has recycled an old server for our use, and we are working 
to get it configured in a way that's enough like the production 
environment that we will have some confidence that a successful test 
there will mean a successful rollout on the English Wikipedia. 
Unfortunately, the production environment is complicated, and Rob has a 
lot on his plate, probably too much, so this is taking a while.

As soon as that's ready, I will be very excited to put up test versions 
of both the English Wikipedia and the German one, so that the community 
can test, give feedback, and opine on whether it's ready to go.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] At school

[William Pietri]

On 02/16/2010 02:12 AM, Ziko van Dijk wrote:
> In general: "Never before people knew so little about something they
> use so often", as a German journalist said about Wikipedia.

In a strange way, that pleases me; as Danny Hillis says, "What people 
mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn't work yet." That 
people use Wikipedia regularly without caring about the the inner 
workings is a sign that we've done something right. Of course, it might 
be too right; maybe we'd like people to pay better attention to the 
quality of what they're reading.

Interestingly, the people who make luggage X-ray machines have a similar 
problem: problems are rare enough that the operators get bored and stop 
looking. Their solution is something called Threat Image Projection: 
they randomly add pictures of bad things to images of real bags. When 
the operator notices something dangerous, they press the "threat" 
button. If they don't notice a projected threat, it's counted against 
them. That keeps the operators alert enough that they'll hopefully 
notice real threats.

I'd love to find some way to usefully apply this approach to Wikipedia, 
but haven't come up with anything yet. Perhaps someone here will.


William
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Re: [Foundation-l] At school

[William Pietri]

On 02/16/2010 03:09 AM, Domas Mituzas wrote:
> Hey Philippe,
>
>
>> That's pretty snarky, Domas.  There was a legitimate question there.
>>  
>
> :-) Did community strategy members come up with this conclusion, or you had 
> to involve external consultants?!
>

Domas, I am disappointed with the frequent disrespect with which you 
treat colleagues, as exemplified by your responses here to Tyler and 
Philippe.

Sometimes I have to work very hard to see past that to the value of your 
technical contributions. And from time to time I wonder to what extent 
that value is counterbalanced by potential contributors that you drive off.

If you are not sure how to demonstrate respect or interact politely in 
on-line forums and would like to change that, let me (or somebody) know. 
It was something a lot of us -- me certainly included -- had to learn 
consciously at one point or another, so I'm sure a lot of people could help.

William



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Re: [Foundation-l] 2008/2009 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report

[William Pietri]

On 01/25/2010 10:26 AM, Cary Bass wrote:
>> "M" before the abbreviation of a unit means 1,000, but on its own
>> >  it is far more commonly used to mean 1,000,000. "m" never means
>> >  1,000 - it means 1/1,000 when used with the abbreviation of a unit,
>> >  but on its own it usually means 1,000,000 too.
>>  
> I beg to differ, Thomas.  It may be an Americanism (I would have to
> find a source for that), but "M" is generally understood to refer to
> thousands in  currency.  It comes directly from the Latin "Mille".
>

If there's one mailing list in the world where readers will forgive me 
for digging into this, I imagine it's this one.

The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and 
Bloomberg  all use "m" after currency to denote million. E.g.:

"Yahoo! reported a profit of $153m in the fourth quarter." [1]
"Boston Scientific To Pay $22M To Settle DOJ Investigation" [2]
"Avatar takes $242m globally in first weekend" [3]
"Waterland May Bid $100M for MetLife's Taiwan Unit, Times Says" [4]


The New York Times, as far as I can tell, always writes the word out. 
And Reuters seems to use both mln and m.

The only common use I can think of where M doesn't represent millions is 
in the advertising term CPM, or cost per mille:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_mille


William

[1] http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15406816
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091223-710631.html
[3] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/94f9e866-ee99-11de-944c-00144feab49a.html
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Re: [Foundation-l] sell wikipedia

[William Pietri]

On 01/23/2010 02:59 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> William Pietri wrote:
>> I note that just last night I was browsing EBay to see what a set of the
>> 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica goes for. For $10, I could get it on DVD.
>> Or I could pay hundreds for a physical set. I would never buy the DVD,
>> but I might buy the physical set. And I already own a reproduction of
>> the 3-volume 1768 edition.
>
>
> Out of curiosity, how does the three volume edition
> measure up?
>

I'm not quite sure how to answer that. Is there something you wanted me 
to measure it against?

Personally, I find it a delight, and am prone to flipping through it 
when I'm wondering what exactly an encyclopedia is. More for inspiration 
than knowledge, of course. But it's nice to see the familiar features: 
articles, large and small; redirects, see-alsos, illustrations, 
references; even a proto-NPOV, where on topics of dispute, both sides 
are explained.

My second-favorite thing about it is that the three volumes, which were 
published serially, are A-B, C-L, M-Z. I've always suspected they 
started out with a surplus of ambition and then realized what they were 
up against. And my favorite thing is the preface, which starts out, 
"Utility ought to be the principle intention of every publication." 
Reading through it never fails to remind me what a great enterprise an 
encyclopedia is, both theirs and ours.

If there isn't a copy in the WMF office, I'm glad to leave mine there 
upon request for a while.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] sell wikipedia

[William Pietri]

On 01/21/2010 12:20 AM, Huib Laurens wrote:
> Why would anybody want to buy it if it is possible to download it for free?
>

This is a topic that's getting a lot of attention. For example, Kevin 
Kelly lists 8 things that are better than free:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

In our case, some of them don't apply. But I could see us making use of 
personalization, interpretation, embodiment, and patronage. I also think 
we could sell a sense of association if we wanted to. Social status is 
another good along these lines (think premium members and first-class 
tickets) but I don't immediately see a way Wikipedia could make use of that.


I note that just last night I was browsing EBay to see what a set of the 
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica goes for. For $10, I could get it on DVD. 
Or I could pay hundreds for a physical set. I would never buy the DVD, 
but I might buy the physical set. And I already own a reproduction of 
the 3-volume 1768 edition.

Any practical reason I'd come up with for purchases like that, or my 
Addams Family pinball machine, would be tenuous justifications. I buy 
those things not for the things themselves, but because I love the idea 
of those things. It seems reasonable to me that people love the idea of 
Wikipedia just as much.

William


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[William Pietri]

On 01/18/2010 09:29 AM, Joan Goma wrote:
> There are 3 phenomena acting simultaneously against the number of visits to
> small projects: The bilingual effect, the size effect, and the Google
> effect. For Catalan case we estimate a penalization factor of 8.3 (that
> means that visits are 8.3 times less that what they should be).
>

In the long term, it seems like we could compensate for all of these 
effects in software.

I'm imagining a user experience where we make it easy for multilingual 
users to switch back and forth. That would include passive detection of 
multilingual users, hinting when good content is available in other 
languages, and making it easy for multilingual users to help translate 
content. It might also be worth looking at URL schemes that are not 100% 
language-specific, to focus the Google effect more usefully.

That would require a lot of technical work, and would raise a number of 
non-technical issues, but I don't see any insurmountable barriers to a 
more fluid experience for multilingual users.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Boing Boing applauds stats.grok.se!

[William Pietri]

On 01/08/2010 09:02 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/07/wikibumps.html
>

And the poster, who is a Boing Boing guest editor, is one of our own, an 
English Wikipedia contributor since 2004:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jokestress

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads almost ready for deployment

[William Pietri]

On 12/19/2009 10:36 PM, David Goodman wrote:
> I did not write that, except for the final sentence [...]
>

Sorry; that was my editing error. I was trying to reply while providing 
more of the context; specifically the part of my message I thought you 
were replying to. That clearly didn't work!

> I was saying that just the most elementary knowledge is enough for
> talk pages. Of all the parts of Wikipedia syntax, it's the easiest.
> The problems for users in learning things is elsewhere.
>

I agree that there are big problems elsewhere; I'm just trying to say 
there are also significant usability problems with discussions.

My broad point is that although the talk page may only use the most 
elementary parts of Mediawiki, and therefore seem easy to us, it still 
has very low usability compared with typical discussion systems on the 
Internet. In placing a much smaller burden on the software, we have 
placed a much larger burden on the user.

Even if our current discussion system were somehow superior, it's still 
very different than other systems, which is in itself a design mistake. 
Indeed, it's one of the most common mistakes in web design, appearing at 
#8 on Jakob Nielsen's top 10 list of design mistakes:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

If we want broad participation, we have to accept it in a way that most 
people are familiar with. Whether we want broad participation is a 
reasonable question, as is what to do with that participation when we 
get it.

William


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Re: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads almost ready for deployment

[William Pietri]

On 12/19/2009 10:54 AM, David Goodman wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 1:17 PM, William Pietri  wrote:
>
>> As a software developer, I'm perfectly comfortable dealing with its dark
>> mysteries. I've spent tens of thousands of hours typing mysterious codes
>> into giant files interpreted by unforgiving machines. But for the 98% of
>> humanity that doesn't have much technical background, our discussion
>> system comes across as somewhere between perplexing and actively hostile.
> mysterious codes? All that is needed is knowing how to indent and sign.
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>

For a person with a PhD in molecular biology, a master's degree in 
Library Science, and 3 years experience on Wikipedia, I'm sure it all 
seems pretty transparent. As somebody who played with punch card 
machines in kindergarten and was coding well before my voice changed, it 
sure looks that way to me. But we're pretty far out on a few different 
bell curves.

I haven't seen an actual usability study on our current discussion 
system, but I have seen and done plenty of other usability studies, and 
my guess is that you'd get a combined drop-out plus failure rate of over 
80% for first-time users. Followed by predictable reactions: 
discouragement, feeling dumb, and taking both the system and our 
community as hostile or unwelcoming.

Whether we want to attract less technical and/or less persistent users 
is a reasonable question. (My view: we should.) But from the usability 
experts I've worked with, I think the nicest reaction they'd give to our 
current discussion system is politely disguised horror. If people are 
skeptical of that, I'd encourage them to reach out to our very sharp 
usability team; I'm sure they have opinions on this, and possibly some data.


William


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Re: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads almost ready for deployment

[William Pietri]

On 12/19/2009 09:25 AM, Teofilo wrote:
> Wiki talk pages as they are now are good. Don't kill them.
>

Having not used LiquidThreads yet, I can't speak to your experience with 
it. But the existing discussion system is a usability nightmare.

As a software developer, I'm perfectly comfortable dealing with its dark 
mysteries. I've spent tens of thousands of hours typing mysterious codes 
into giant files interpreted by unforgiving machines. But for the 98% of 
humanity that doesn't have much technical background, our discussion 
system comes across as somewhere between perplexing and actively hostile.

For proof, just look at how many software packages have copied our 
approach to discussions. As far as I know, the number is zero. The 
common solutions seen in forums, blogs, and community sites across the 
internet have a lot in common with one another, and are rightly nothing 
like what we have.

I have no idea whether LiquidThreads is the right solution, but if we 
want to broaden participation, increase the number of active editors, 
and improve our image, we definitely need something better than what we 
have. Hopefully we can do that in a way that keeps the benefits of the 
current system, but I think it's vital to mitigate the many and glaring 
current flaws.

William



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Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist

[William Pietri]

On 12/16/2009 05:05 AM, geni wrote:
> There is one point left. We can't measure the change in traffic to
> Craigslist but we can measure this:
>
> http://stats.grok.se/en/200912/Craigslist
>


Interesting! If I read that right, the Craigslist page on Wikipedia got 
an extra 15k pageviews or so. As a comparison, my rough guess is that 
Craigslist gets 100m pageviews/day. I base that on these numbers:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigins.htm
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/craigslist.org+wikipedia.org

Assuming the estimate of circa $100m in annual revenues, and making a 
number of other overly simplifying assumptions, the ballpark financial 
advantage to Craigslist for Craig Newmark's appearance here is about 
$40, or 13 seconds worth of revenues.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist

[William Pietri]

On 12/15/2009 11:20 AM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
> I for one have never heart of Craigslist before and I don't think I have heart
> anybody talking about it before in real life.
>

This may be a regional thing.

According to Alexa, Craiglist is the 11th most popular US web site, 
while Wikipedia is 7th. Compete.com's numbers, which I think are pretty 
US-centric, show Craigslist with 50m monthly users. It has also been 
popular for a relatively long time, predating Wikipedia by a number of 
years. Like Wikipedia, it gets a fair bit of media coverage not just for 
what it is, but because it has a lot of interest for journalists; 
Craiglist is frequently mentioned as major cause of declining US 
newspaper revenues because it destroyed much of the classified ads market.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment

[William Pietri]

On 12/14/2009 05:50 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
> In terms of the ethics, there's a big difference between inaction on
> an issue, say poverty in Africa, and taking direct action in order to
> make things worse. Wikimedia is not paying people to take food from
> children's mouths, but it is paying people to burn coal for
> electricity. I don't think we can claim to be mere bystanders.
>

I think that's the key distinction here. Our mission is to make the 
world better in a pretty specific way, and we should stick to that. 
However, that's not a license to make the world worse in other ways.

For example, when we get rid of old servers, we can't just dump the 
toxic components in the nearest river, even if that's cheaper. We have 
to dispose of them responsibly, even if polluting is nominally better 
for our mission. The same principle would seem to apply to the CO2 we 
currently emit. The tricky part is the extent to which it's practical 
for us alone to take action, as opposed to waiting for society to catch up.

Assuming Domas's number (which seems ballpark correct) and the numbers 
in our article on green tags, we'd be looking at an expense of circa 
$20k/yr. That's real money, but at 4% of our hosting budget, it doesn't 
seem crazy. There are definitely a lot of thorny questions about the 
quality of the tags, so good ones could be more, but perhaps not much more.

If we get interested in this, I know an expert in the field, and I'm 
glad to put someone at the foundation in touch.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment

[William Pietri]

On 12/12/2009 08:32 AM, Teofilo wrote:
> Do we have an idea of the energy consumption related to the online
> access to a Wikipedia article ? Some people say that a few minutes
> long search on a search engine costs as much energy as boiling water
> for a cup of tea : is that story true in the case of Wikipedia (4) ?
>

I don't have time to do the math right now, but I believe this could be 
estimated from publicly available data. You'd take the pageview numbers:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportRequests.htm

You'd look up our various servers:

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Main_Page

And then make some reasonable guesses as to actual power consumption. 
(Sysadmins often measure this, so I'm sure some Googling would turn up 
good approximations.) Divide one number by the other and you've got a 
reasonably good guess at power usage per pageview.

You could take that a step farther by looking up the power composition 
where the server farms are and estimating CO2 output.

If anybody tries to do this and gets stuck, drop me a line.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] Housekeeping: One user on moderation today

[William Pietri]

Ryan Lomonaco wrote:
> My reading of it was X replies per person per day in each thread.  I agree
> with you that there should not be a set limit per thread as a whole.

It might be interesting to combine that with a throttled number of 
replies from one individual to another. At least for me, the 
lowest-value messages are often ones where two people are arguing with 
one another, apparently forgetting the interests of the broader audience.

With either of those, before creating a firm limit, an interesting step 
might be notification. E.g.:

Dear X:

I notice that in the last 24 hours you've sent 5 messages on the
topic "Pedophilia and the non-discrimination policy", with 4 of them
replying to person Y. That might be more than the average list
subscriber wants to read. Before you reply again, you might consider
taking a break, moving the discussion off-list, or asking list
moderators how valualbe they're finding the discussion.

Thanks,

The Foundation-L Robot


My theory here is that the problem may more be lack of awareness than 
intentional misbehavior, making feedback a reasonable substitute for 
control.


William
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Re: [Foundation-l] Follow up: Fan History joining the WMF family

[William Pietri]

Hi, Laura. I'll stay out of the main discussion here, but I just wanted 
to address one point as a bystander who has spent a lot of years 
involved with Internet startups:

Laura Hale wrote:
> [...] There are other places we would like to approach.
> (And if you have ideas for who would be a good fit, please get in touch with
> me.)  Is it ethical for us to approach other people and organizations while
> we have this on the table with the WMF?  If we approach other people in the
> mean time, does that signal that our interest in the WMF is dead?

What you're talking about doesn't have a lot of direct precedents that I 
know of, but with business acquisitions it's common to talk to multiple 
people at the same time. Indeed, in some cases, I understand it's a 
legal duty to do so. The notion is that the fairest deals happen in the 
broadest markets.

In that context, the way that one signals interest is to continue to 
talk, and by the amount of effort put into the talking.

No matter who you're talking with, one concept you should be aware of as 
you go forward is what I've heard called "the venture capitalist's no". 
Because things on the Internet change with some frequency, and because 
the future is hard to predict, there's often not much incentive to give 
a clear negative answer. There's also not a lot of incentive for 
demanding them; as satisfying as clarity is, startups find it more 
valuable still to keep their options open.

I'm not sure how much that applies to the people you plan to approach, 
but if I were you I'd try to be prepared for a fair-bit of well-meant fog.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia

[William Pietri]

Samuel Klein wrote:
> I've been working with swahili-speaking students over the past week
> introducing them to Wikipedia (as part of an article-writing contest sw:wp
> is running this winter).  They're net-savvy, many maintain a blog, but
> they're not geeks.  And they tend to be totally baffled by the Wikipedia
> editing process, from finding the 'edit' tab to adding sections or images to
> grasping the lifecycle of an article.  That has significantly changed my
> impression of the current barrier to entry for using MediaWiki.

I would love to see a more detailed writeup of how your impressions have 
changed, and examples of experiences that have changed them.

One of the most pernicious problems in software development is that you 
can't temporarily forget what you know. The closest you can come is to 
learn about the experiences of novices. In aid of that, I've seen 
real-life use cases provide a lot of insights.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia

[William Pietri]

altally wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 4:57 PM, William Pietri  wrote
>> A reporter pal points out to me that the  Wall Street Journal has a
>> front page story on Wikipedia: "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages".
>> Alas, it's subscriber-only:
>>
>> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125893981183759969.html
>> 
>
> I'm able to view it without being subscribed.
>   


Odd. I still can't see it at that link, but it turns out if I click 
through from Google, I can see the text:

http://www.google.com/#q=wsj+"Wikipedia.org+is+the+fifth";

Overall, it seems like a pretty solid article. Much more nuanced and 
thoughtful than I was expecting from the video.


William


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[Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia

[William Pietri]

A reporter pal points out to me that the  Wall Street Journal has a 
front page story on Wikipedia: "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages". 
Alas, it's subscriber-only:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125893981183759969.html

There's also a publicly viewable blog article "Is Wikipedia Too 
Unfriendly to Newbies?", and an interview with their reporters:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/11/23/is-wikipedia-too-unfriendly-to-newbies/
http://online.wsj.com/video/news-hub-wikipedia-volunteers-quit/BB9E24E7-2A18-4762-A55E-4D9142975029.html

I suspect it's nothing we haven't been talking about for a while, but if 
anybody with access has a chance to summarize the main points, I'd find 
that helpful in replying to the friends who will inevitably be asking 
about this. If not because of this article, then from the other 
reporters that I presume will be joining in shortly.

William




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Re: [Foundation-l] The state of Foundation-l (again) was: Recent firing?

[William Pietri]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> So people would rather I decided what they are and aren't interested
> in? Surprising... most people I know like to make their own decisions
> about things like that...

My guess is that people here want what pretty much anybody in a shared 
context wants: consideration and respect for their experiences. You 
don't have to unilaterally decide what interests people; if you're 
unsure, you can just ask.

Elsewhere on the Internet I moderate a couple of mailing lists, and I 
frequently get questions like these:

* I'm new to the group, and wondered if it would be ok to ask about X.
* Have I been talking too much about Y? People seem interested, but
  it's a little off topic.
* I'm worried that thread Z has gone too long. Am I beating a dead
  horse?


William



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Re: [Foundation-l] The state of Foundation-l (again) was: Recent firing?

[William Pietri]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/11/7 William Pietri :
>   
>> Well, you perceive the burden as negligible for them. Have you asked
>> them? My impression was that you imagined it would be easy for them
>> because it would be easy for you. Personally, I'd imagine otherwise,
>> based partly on how easy it would be for me, and partly on a lot of time
>> spent observing people using software.
>> 
>
> Ignoring emails *is* easy. Anyone that says otherwise is wrong. I do
> not subscribe to this "everyone's opinion is equally valid" nonsense -
> sometimes people are just plain wrong.
>   

I am definitely not suggesting that all opinions are equally valid. But 
personally I decline to accept as proof your assertion that your view is 
correct. In my line of work, we prove these things with data.

If you wanted to demonstrate that ignoring emails is indeed easy for all 
people, using all email readers, and for all purposes with which people 
approach their email reading, you would have a lot of research ahead of 
you. You might start with Kuniavsky's book "Observing the User 
Experience". My guess is that you'd find that it is easy for a 
relatively small percentage of people.

Until you want to do that, though, if you'd like the discussion to 
proceed, you'll have to accept that there are differing opinions on the 
topic. Not that you have to like them or agree with them, but I expect 
you'd benefit by demonstrating respect for their holders.


> Of course not sending emails is easy. There is more to something being
> burdensome than it being difficult. Not sending an email is
> sacrificing your freedom of expression for someone else - that is a
> definite burden. It is burden that is it sometimes appropriate to take
> on, but this isn't such a time.
>   

It's not clear to me that freedom of expression is a useful term here, 
in that I see no government involvement. Could we instead look at is as 
your desire, and perhaps the desire of others, to say something to this 
group? If so, what do you think motivates that desire?

And obviously, other people have different desires for the use of this 
list. What do you think their motivations are?


>> Part of the problem may be that people often don't like other people
>> imposing burdens on them. It's often read as an attempt of social
>> dominance, or as rude or contemptuous. So your unilateral placing of
>> burden may be interfering with your desire to move the conversation forward.
>> 
>
> People telling me not to send the emails I want to is them
> unilaterally imposing a burden on me. How is that different?
>   

Yes, that was my point. You and a few others don't like others asking 
for a change in behavior, so I was hoping you'd have some sympathy for 
them. But as far as I know, they aren't actually imposing anything, in 
that nobody is actually stopping the posts in question. So if there's 
actual imposing going on, it's on the part of the posters.


>> If you wanted to know, you could start by asking them.
>
> When I make a point during an argument I am always implicitly asking
> people that disagree to make a counter-point. That is how arguments
> work.
>   

Well, that's how you want them to work. That used to be how I approached 
them, too. But that's now how they work for a lot of people. And some 
people would rather not have arguments at all, favoring discussions instead.

I tried to change my approach because I got feedback from friends that I 
was coming across as "an annoying, argumentative jerk", lacking in 
consideration for my conversational partners. That wasn't what was going 
on in my head, but that was what plenty of people were perceiving. 
Eventually I decided I was more interested in being effective than in 
keeping my old behaviors.

I think of it as a cultural thing; different people have different 
customs, and what's ok in one place is rude in another. Or one time and 
another; I've been working my way through the Sherlock Holmes novels 
recently, and I've been enjoying the Victorian approach to politeness 
immensely.

William
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Re: [Foundation-l] The state of Foundation-l (again) was: Recent firing?

[William Pietri]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> Yes, I am placing the burden on other people and I've explained why:
> The burden is negligible for other people. It is significant for me.
>   

Well, you perceive the burden as negligible for them. Have you asked 
them? My impression was that you imagined it would be easy for them 
because it would be easy for you. Personally, I'd imagine otherwise, 
based partly on how easy it would be for me, and partly on a lot of time 
spent observing people using software.

A similar effect might apply the other way. Perhaps they see the 
behavior they want as easy for you because it's easy for them? If so, 
you could consider asking people to help you.

Part of the problem may be that people often don't like other people 
imposing burdens on them. It's often read as an attempt of social 
dominance, or as rude or contemptuous. So your unilateral placing of 
burden may be interfering with your desire to move the conversation forward.

>> You seem like a pretty sharp fellow, and so I'm sure your solution not
>> only looks most rational to you, but has good odds of being so by some
>> reasonable set of metrics. But other people may be using different
>> criteria, and you're unlikely to get them to change something deep like
>> that via an email or two, especially if they already feel frustration
>> toward you.
>> 
>
> If someone would explain their criteria, this conversation could move
> forwards rather than round in circles...
>   

If you wanted to know, you could start by asking them. Perhaps even off 
list, as a conversation like that may be more easily held out of the 
glare of the spotlight, and certainly doesn't require all of us. That 
may take some work on both sides, though; a lot of people either don't 
know or aren't good at articulating their values, judgment criteria, and 
decision-making processes. As with, say, moving one's arms, a lot more 
people do it then know how it works.

Beyond that, there's an ocean of material on how people think and 
decide, how groups work effectively together, and how people behave in 
relation to software and to on-line communities. If you'd like 
suggestions there, drop me a line off list with more info on what you're 
looking for, and I'm glad to rummage through my shelves.

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] The state of Foundation-l (again) was: Recent firing?

[William Pietri]

Hi, Thomas.

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> Indeed. My standard advice for people on how to interpret my
> text-based messages is this: If in doubt, I don't mean any offence. If
> I want to offend you, I will leave you in no doubt.
>   

I think there's a common element in this and your "just ignore" proposal 
that will lead to continued frustration on both sides. You're placing 
the burden for solving a shared problem on other people, and quite a lot 
of them.

You seem like a pretty sharp fellow, and so I'm sure your solution not 
only looks most rational to you, but has good odds of being so by some 
reasonable set of metrics. But other people may be using different 
criteria, and you're unlikely to get them to change something deep like 
that via an email or two, especially if they already feel frustration 
toward you.

As a software developer, I've struggled a lot with issues like this. 
Part of me wants the rational solution, but I also really like getting 
things done, which often leads me to solutions that have more to do with 
effectiveness and practicality. And what's most effective and practical 
when dealing with my fellow mutant chimps is poorly correlated with what 
I find most pleasing to my rational side.

That's not to advocate for either side of this, really. If you really 
want to change the email-use behavior of everybody on this list, there 
are approaches for that. But absent that substantial amount of work, or 
absent some other change, frustration is likely to continue.

And personally, I find that frustrating, as not only do I like a 
collegial working environment, but I think collegiality makes for more 
effective group discussion and group action.

William



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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews has not failed

[William Pietri]

Robert Rohde wrote:
> What resources?  With only ~1.5M hits per month, EN Wikinews' share of
> the tech / internet services budget probably only comes to a couple
> thousand dollars per year, in other words basically a rounding error
> in the budget.

I'd guess it's less than that. I just calculated cost/pageview numbers 
for a client that serves a lot of pages, and adding the Wikinews traffic 
to their load would cost them maybe $40/month, even including a share of 
hardware costs.

I don't have the WMF numbers handy to do the equivalent comparison, but 
I wouldn't be surprised if WMF page views were an order of magnitude 
cheaper given their scale and their non-profit status.

Either way, it's plausible Wikinews covers its own expenses through 
generated donations. Shutting it down would also have costs, both 
financial and reputational. So the question for me isn't so much, 
"should we keep it running?" but, "why would we pay to kill it?"

William

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Re: [Foundation-l] How to make a puzzle globe

[William Pietri]

David Gerard wrote:
> http://www.externaute.net/la-globe-en-puzzle-de-wikipedia-en-realite-3d/1071
>   

English-speakers may wish to consult the original source, the blog of 
the globe-makers, here:

http://www.becausewecan.org/Wiki_globe

There are more photos and some explanatory text.


Those in the SF area with an interest in this kind of thing should keep 
an eye on their blog for their occasional open houses. E.g.:

http://www.becausewecan.org/october09_eatfoodtalkshop

Not only do you get to see the shop and in-progress projects, but a very 
interesting collection of makers turn up there. Last I visited, I met 
one couple who built a 3D printer that uses table sugar as the working 
medium, and got a great under-the-hood tour of a home-converted electric 
car. Very inspiring.

William


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