> I most definitely agree - WONTFIXING a request that is a "bad idea" is > just as important as fixing bugs, or implementing the good ideas. The > art is of course in being able to determine what constitutes a "bad > idea" and a "good idea". Its also important to keep in mind the > community is full of many people with different conflicting goals, you > can't blame them for requesting bad ideas or things they don't > actually want. (Just to be 100% clear, I'm not saying that you (or > anyone else) is blaming the community for that, just making the point) >
Indeed. The really difficult thing here is that every time a bad idea is WONTFIX'd it makes a community member feel that they are being ignored. Do it too many times and you have a lot of community members that feel this way. Don't do it enough and and the product suffers and then there's complaints about it being bloated, difficult to use, etc. It's difficult to win either way. >>I think the major problem with the Op-Ed is that he points the blame >>fully at the foundation when the blame is a combination of the >>foundation and the community. A major part of the problem is that the >>feedback from the community is almost always purely negative, and this >>Op-Ed is another example of that. > > I would disagree that all feedback from the community is negative. I > often get positive feedback from the community. Positive feedback in > my experience seems to most often happen for small bug fix type > changes, but I have seen it for larger changes as well. Then again I'm > a volunteer, so which side of the us vs them fence I fall on seems to > vary. > Not all of the feedback is negative, but the majority is. This is actually fairly natural, though. All software has this problem. People tend to provide negative feedback far more often than positive feedback (think restaurants or seller reviews). What we need is more positive feedback telling us what's going right, rather than mostly hearing what's going wrong. Positive feedback makes developers feel good. That may sound cheesy, but it's pretty demeaning when people give nothing but bad feedback. Positive feedback is far less likely to be ignored, and having a mix of positive and negative feedback makes it more likely that negative feedback won't get ignored due to numbness. >>The flip side of that is that the >>foundation communicates very poorly with the community. It's difficult >>to effectively communicate with the community because our >>communication tools suck. Our communication tools suck because it's >>very difficult to change them because it's difficult to get the >>community to agree with changes. Welcome to the vicious circle. > > Quite frankly, the communication tools don't suck that much. It seems > that no one really uses them. When was the last time a developer > posted on the village pump asking for user feedback, or notifying > users of a change, or otherwise talking to the users? We don't even have > messages about upcoming deployments anymore [I guess that's > because they're so frequent it might be considered spam?]. Sure there's the > occasional message, but not much. Although jorm's op-ed didn't meet > with a full 100% positive response, it did seem to be a good step in > the right direction in terms of communication as far as I can tell > from the comments it received. > When I'm doing an ops change that is user facing I write a blog post and I post something to wikitech-l. I don't bother using village pump. There's a reason for that. There's a *lot* of village pumps. Hundreds. In different languages. I can't possibly handle that many different conversations in that many languages. Even if I only post to 2-3 of them, I still have to have the same conversation over and over again with different sets of people. We need a global system for communication for things like this. Everyone should be a part of a single communication thread about changes. All posts in the thread should be able to be translated in a crowd-sourced manner. Thankfully, there's messaging and notification systems planned (and being built currently?) that will bring us part of the way there. Of course, MZ's Op-Ed harshly criticized the Op-Ed that discussed these systems, so it seems my point about this is kind of being proven ;). >>> One of the most important points here is about experimenting on users; and >>> it should be taken seriously. I also believe strongly that, as the author >>> suggests, we should treat editors as colleagues rather than customers. >>> > >>This assumes that we aren't currently. I challenge the assumption. Can >>we get some evidence of that being the case? During the summer of >>research we worked directly with the community as colleagues. There's >>numerous other examples of this being the case. > > I agree with MZ on this point. Furthermore it feels this problem has > gotten worse with time. (On the flip side, there is an even more > pronounced problem with the "community" treating us as service > providers instead of colleagues - so it goes both ways) > Can you provide us with some examples? I'd like to see what's been happening so that I can avoid behaving similarly. - Ryan _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
