This community, which takes quite a bit of effort to communicate with, effort which I have not seen from the development team:
> Any changes to the software must be gradual and reversible. We need to make > sure that any changes contribute positively to the community, as ultimately > determined by everybody in Wikipedia, in full consultation with the > community consensus. -- Jimbo > Wales<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales> > I've been told by a volunteer developer in that this quote is irrelevant. I wonder how many people believe that is true. On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Domas Mituzas <midom.li...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hello Brian, > > thanks for all your insights, bashing and vocal support of your pet > ideas. > > I understand, that SMW is academically interesting concept (though > there're contradicting ideas in academia too, suggesting natural > language processing as an alternative, and this seems where currently > research tries to go too), and it provides "usability" in niche cases > (academic data crunching). > > I fail to see why you associate SMW with general usability we're > trying to think about? Is that something we simple mortals cannot > understand, or are you simply out of touch from reality? > > See, our project is special. > > a) We have mass collaboration at large > b) We end up having mass collaboration on individual articles and topics > c) We have mega-mass readership > d) We have massive scope and depth > > And, oh well, we have to run software development to facilitate all > that. As you may notice, the above list puts quite some huge > constraints on what we can do. > All our features end up being incremental, and even though in theory > they are easy to revert, it is the mass collaboration that picks it up > and moves to a stage where it is not that easy (and that happens > everywhere, where lots of work is being done). > > So, you are attacking templates, which have helped to deal with nearly > everything we do (and are tiny, compared to overall content they > facilitate), and were part of incremental development of the site and > where editing community was going. Of course, there are ways to make > some of our template management way better (template catalogues, more > visual editing of parameters, less special characters for casual > editors), but they generally are how we imagine and do information > management. > > Now, if you want to come up with academic attitudes, and start telling > how ontology is important, and all the semantic meanings have to be > highlighted, sure, go on, talk to community, they can do it without > software support too - by normalizing templates, using templates for > tagging relations, then use various external tools to build > information overlays on top of that. Make us believe stuff like that > has to be deployed by showing initiative in the communities, not by > showing initiative by external parties. > > Once it comes to actual software engineering, we have quite limited > resources, and quite important mandate and cause. > We have to make sure, that readers will be able to read, editors will > be able to edit, and foundation will still be able to support the > project. > We may not always try to be exceptionally perfect (Tim does ;-), but > that is because we do not want to be too stressed either. > > So, when it comes to reader community, software is doing work for > them. Some of readers end up engineering software to make it better. > When it comes to editing community, software does the work for them. > Some of editors end up engineering software to make it better. > > Which community are you talking about? > > BR, > -- > Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] > > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
