There will be a slight delay ...
- d. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller <e...@wikimedia.org> Date: 2009/9/28 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia. To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org> Hi Greg, a quick note on Sue's behalf since we're all quite swamped right now. On the tech side of things we're planning for the CTO transition right now, as well as building up our capacity; those are core foundation-building priorities that have to be higher than any specific deployment, particularly given Brion's departure now. We haven't committed to a specific FlaggedRevs deployment deadline precisely because there isn't enough capacity right now to allocate to the project. Pretty much all development work is done by a single contractor, Aaron Schulz, who is amazing and deserves massive credit for the fact that there is a usable FlaggedRevs extension at all, which is in production use on our second-largest Wikipedia and many others. There's no project manager for it, there are no other developers who are assigned to working with Aaron, nor are there team meetings to plan the further roll-out of the product. The only situation where there's actually a dedicated full-time team working on one specific problem-set is the usability project, and that's because we've been able to receive an $890,000 grant specifically to build it. It's time-limited, but we're looking for ways to extend it past its grant run. As I think has been visible with the successful roll-out of the usability beta, the milestones so far, etc., this is one viable approach to get stuff done. Should we have a dedicated quality assurance team? Perhaps; it's a high-risk but potentially also high-gain technology priority. Is it higher priority than, for example, massively improving mobile access to Wikipedia and thereby potentially reaching hundreds of millions of new readers/contributors? Maybe: The Strategy Project is designed to help us answers these questions. At this stage of organizational development, we can possibly have 2-3 usability-sized tech projects per year. There are other ways to support project roll-outs, such as hiring product/project managers, which we've budgeted for but may have to delay past the other planned tech hiring. All that said, even with Brion transitioning, we're hoping to have at least some scheduled small group conversations about the roll-out plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with de.wp, and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation. The user interface is well-suited for the current de.wp implementation, but needs some TLC to work for the "flagged protection" use case. We're committed to getting there but at this stage I can't give you a better promise than allocating some percentage of the core team to supporting the UI development, testing, and production roll-out, hopefully resulting in a full production roll-out prior to the end of this year. Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l