I actually meant a different type of maintenance. Maintaining the encyclopedia (and other wiki projects) is of course an activity that needs software support.
But software is also something that needs maintenance. Technology, standards, circumstances change over time. Software left alone will "bitrot" over time. A long term technical strategy to do anything needs to account for that, plan for that. One off feature development does not. Democratically directed one-off feature development accounts for that even less. In response to Johnathan: So lets say that ORES/magic AI detects something is a bot. Then what? That's a small part of the picture. In fact you don't even need AI to do this, plenty of the vandal bots have generic programming language user-agents (AI could of course be useful for long-tail here, but there's much simpler stuff to start off with). Do we expose this to abusefilter somehow? Do we add a tag to mark it in RC/watchlist? Do we block it? Do we rate limit it? What amount of false positives are acceptable? What is the UI for all this? To what extent is this hard coded, and to what extent do communities control the feature? etc We don't need products to detect bots. Making products to detect bots is easy. We need product managers to come up with socio-technical systems that make sense in our special context. -- Brian On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 8:36 PM Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > Since we're discussing how the Tech Wishlist works then I will comment on a > few points specifically regarding that wishlist. > > 1. A gentle correction: the recommendations are ranked by vote, not by > consensus. This has pros and cons. > > 2a. If memory serves me correctly, the wishlist process was designed by WMF > rather than designed by community consensus. I may be wrong about this, but > in my search of historical records I have not found evidence to the > contrary. I think that redesigning the process would be worth considering, > and I hope that a redesign would help to account for the types of needs > that bawolff described in his second paragraph. > > 2b.. I think that it's an overstatement to say that "nobody ever votes for > maintenance until its way too late and everything is about to explode". I > think that many non-WMF people are aware of our backlogs, the endless > requests for help and conflict resolution, and the many challenges of > maintaining what we have with the current population of skilled and good > faith non-WMF people. However, I have the impression that there is a common > *tendency* among humans in general to chase shiny new features instead of > doing mostly thankless work, and I agree that the tech wishlist is unlikely > even in a redesigned form to be well suited for long term planning. I think > that WMF's strategy process may be a better way to plan for the long term, > including for maintenance activities that are mostly thankless and do not > necessarily correlate with increasing someone's personal power, making > their resume look better, or having fun. Fortunately the volunteer > mentality of many non-WMF people means that we do have people who are > willing to do mostly thankless, mundane, and/or stressful work, and I think > that some of us feel that our work is important for maintaining the > encyclopedia even when we do not enjoy it, but we have a finite supply of > time from such people. > > Pine > ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
