David Gerard wrote: >Unfortunately - and we quite definitely saw this in the VE >introduction - it leaves a lot of them in the position of customer >service ablative firewall, the designated targets of people's >frustration.
Yep. At least one of the on-wiki comments by a liaison made me do a double-take as it had the tone of "your call is very important to us, please stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly." But I don't think this is about people shooting the messenger, exactly. With VisualEditor, it was a rush to deployment. And this has been fully acknowledged as a mistake. But the Wikimedia Foundation took the lesson to be that it simply needed to move a bit more slowly, not more smartly. For comparison, we now have MediaViewer, which moved through as a beta feature. They say MediaViewer may one day be as feature-ful as the file description pages we've had for a long time (editing capability, oh my!). It makes little sense to create hobbled file description pages in JavaScript rather than addressing the actual issues that file description pages have, but this point seems to have gotten completely lost somewhere. I think the common theme here is forcing software upon wiki communities. But I see VisualEditor and other efforts as distinct from far more questionable features. We're occasionally, though repeatedly, seeing resource investment in features that nobody asked for or wanted, and this can be frustrating. This frustration is certainly compounded when these features are forced on users, but the two issues (a rush to deploy features versus resource allocation for unwanted features), while sometimes intertwined, can certainly also be discrete. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/620310885#nyb MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
