The quotes below are illustrative excerpts, my replies are to the whole post.
On 03/09/10 09:05, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > That's what leads to things like > <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/67299>. Some > people said that maybe that could have been phrased better, or > something. But the revert wasn't the problem, it was a symptom of the > problem. The problem was that the design was decided on somewhere > that volunteers couldn't or wouldn't participate. Of course you > revert something that contradicts an agreed-upon design -- the problem > is that the agreed-upon design was only agreed upon by a small group > of employees. How are volunteers supposed to contribute in that > environment, if they don't know what tune they're supposed to be > dancing to? The usability team has shown some amount of arrogance and aloofness in their dealings with the developer community, and I understand that you were upset by that. But I don't think arrogance is a trait which is confined to employees, in fact I think it's a near-universal fault. Being able to get stuff done in spite of it is an essential skill. I think that all developers care about usability, and that UI design should be a part of every project team. I don't think we should have one team writing bad interfaces, and another team rewriting them to be "usable", it's inefficient. Ideally, UI experts should be available to be assigned to any project, and this is already happening to some extent. Project-based teams should hopefully be more open and accessible than the usability team was. As for fundraising, the work is uninspiring, and I don't think we've ever managed to get volunteers interested in it regardless of how open we've been. > * Shut down the secret staff IRC channel. Development discussion can > take place in #mediawiki, ops in #wikimedia-tech, other stuff in > #wikimedia or whatever. If users interfere with ops' discussions > sometimes in #wikimedia-tech during outages or such, set all sysadmins > +v and set the channel +m as necessary. That's worked in the past. Your recommendations seem insensitive and unrealistic. What works for you does not necessarily work for everyone. Some contributors (both employees and volunteers) are not comfortable talking in a public forum, and prefer to not say anything at all than to broadcast their ideas to the world on a publically logged IRC channel or mailing list. I used to rail against such sensitivities, but I've come to see that as unproductive. I still think that we should encourage people to use public forums, but only to a point, and that point should not be "use the public forum or don't contribute at all", as you seem to be suggesting. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
