Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-01-10/Technology report

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• This year, I re-created a MediaWiki team It's sad that this is at least the second time someone has had to do that. Lila killed the first one in the Reorg of Doom. Other managers unrecognizably transformed the second trying to further their rise, driving off some good people in the process. Anomie⚔ 13:53, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
  • It was quite an eye-opener for me to realize that the bot I volunteered to take over eleven years ago was developed and run by volunteers, and later to realize that even virtually the entire MediaWiki software platform that Wikipedia runs on was also developed and supported by volunteers. At this point I assume that virtually everything but the server hardware and fundraising is run by volunteers. It's nice to know that there is a MediaWiki team, albeit one listed at the very bottom of the organization. It was nice to meet Selena and Birgit in Toronto at the November conference there. – wbm1058 (talk) 04:38, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
• I think the Foundation is really thinking through these issues correctly under Maryana, and I like what Selena had to say here. They are taking the issue of editor retention seriously. No doubt there will always be some tension between the WMF and Wikipedians, but this is a very positive indication. —Ganesha811 (talk) 22:39, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
• In April 2024 you said, "My experience so far has been that we (the Wikimedia Foundation) have a very contentious relationship with English Wikipedia." As a Wikimedia community member, I agree with this. Here you ask, "How can we, as the Foundation, best support volunteers so that you can do the work of producing more knowledge?" I would like 1) the Foundation to openly encourage the Wikimedia community to list points of contention and 2) empower the community to seriously discuss these issues in public. Right now, the Wikimedia Foundation has extreme aversion to acknowledging when the Wikimedia community consensus takes different social and ethical positions than the Wikimedia Foundation. Without the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community being able to openly discuss differences as peer institutions, I see little hope of reconciling differences. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:01, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
• Years ago, WMF managed to arrest the decline in the number of editors, but we still have the problem of more of the work being done by fewer editors. The problem is generational; when you talk to the kids, not just the internet but the Wikipedia has always been there. Most don't even stop to think that someone wrote it. And no one looks at the source code of web pages any more, as it is a mass of incomprehensible CSS. I hope that WMF can come up with another solution. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:13, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
• Some thoughts:
  1. The Foundation needs to think beyond technology to solve editor retention problems. For example, Wikimedia markup is not that difficult: it's just another form of punctuation. The problem, IMHO, is with templates which are either poorly documented or unfindable. In the past when I've complained about this, the response has been "You're right, but the developers want to make these changes before they're documented." Users don't care about what's under the hood: knowing that they exist & how to use them is the important part.
  2. Money always helps. (Note: this is a point I believe I've mentioned to Selena face-to-face.) A lot of work -- currently unpaid -- goes into creating & maintaining all of the projects, & "labor of love" only motivates volunteers so far. At the same time, we have repeated demonstrations that there is a lot of money available. (For example, $1 million was wasted on an unneeded & poorly-received effort to renaming the Foundation. Other examples can easily be found.) Now I'm not even asking that every volunteer be given a share of money from the donations -- or interest on the endowment -- but that rules or a procedure be made available to volunteers for requesting funding for uses of this money beyond evangelism. Say, if a volunteer has written several Featured Articles they are qualified to ask for money to buy (or be reimbursed) research materials. After all, writing a useful article -- by which I mean an article of B or even C quality -- can take as much effort as writing an undergraduate term paper; having done both, I know what I'm saying here. Currently, there is little indication this is possible. (And then there are the needs of volunteers who perform less visible but equally valuable work such as monitoring AfD or resolving disputes.)
  3. And then there's having an open dialogue with the volunteer community. Sometimes we volunteers are wrong, & sometimes we're inexcusably rude. But both of those arise because far too often the Foundation treats us as the staff of your average social media website, such as Twitter/X or Stack Exchange, treats its users: as a bunch of anonymous eyeballs who must be tolerated because it's part of the job. While there are individual Foundation employees who are praiseworthy exceptions to this comment, I can't help but reminded of Cory Doctorov's suggestion that a business on the information superhighway has some cool people in it -- "Can you let them come out & play?" -- only to reflect that all of them who are have. -- llywrch (talk) 21:22, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

  On your example for point 2.. I think this is possible. Local wikimedia orgs have purchased books, cameras and refunded event attendance in the past. We have the whole Wikipedia Library. There are lots of examples where recognised editors, organisers and developers are helped with all kinds of things. However due to tax fraud and corruption risks, managing such programs comes with challenges.. So as an editor, you cannot just say "gimme money for a book". You have to bring the use case, document it, administrate it and verify it. And for many editors that is simply too much work. I think this is an important point to make as I often see people asking for things, which I know my local wikimedia org can help with or facilitate, yet some people are unaware, or don't want to spend effort. But effort is needed because without it, abuse will follow. And if you want people not to have to spend effort than you have to think it through to the level of a Wikipedia Library initiative. So if this is something that interests you I would encourage you to, like the wikipedia library, spend some time thinking about how to make a program for this work. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:57, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Another issue? VisualEditor is praised because time was put in to fix it. It was improved immensely until it actually worked, and wasn't a buggy mess.

This is not true of a lot of things pushed forwards by the Foundation. MediaViewer thinks that if the date is given as 1900, then the work dates from 1 January 1900, and will tell people that. If the work is by Mathew Brady and Levin Corbin Handy, it'll tell you it was a work by Mathew Brady alone. These bugs have been unfixed for EIGHT YEARS. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.7% of all FPs.} 05:25, 22 January 2024 (UTC)