FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update

[Erik Moeller-4]

All,

this is a quick note to let you know that we've signed on two people,
William Pietri and Howie Fung, to help us on a contract basis with the
deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia.

William is an IT consultant and systems/software engineer; see his
userpage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri --
he is also a long-time Wikipedian. He will support the overall
roll-out coordination and requirements planning.

Howie is an experienced Product Manager who previously worked with
Real Networks/Rhapsody and PayPal; see LinkedIn profile here:
<http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=3830901>.

We met Howie during our search for the Multimedia Usability Product
Manager position, and were impressed by his background, particularly
with regard to user focused product development, and some great first
thoughts he sent us on how to improve the usability of Wikimedia
Commons. Given his background, we thought it would be great to have
his help in doing some more systematic analysis of usability,
terminology and workflow issues with the proposed English Wikipedia
roll-out.

We are eager to roll out the "Flagged Protection" functionality soon.
As Howie and William get up to speed, they'll post info on remaining
work, and get community feedback on what's vital to have before the
first release.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[ChrisiPK]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> We met Howie during our search for the Multimedia Usability Product
> Manager position, and were impressed by his background, particularly
> with regard to user focused product development, and some great first
> thoughts he sent us on how to improve the usability of Wikimedia
> Commons.

So right now, they are only hired to roll out flagged revs on en.wp. I think
that improvements to Commons are at least as vital as en.wp problems, seeing
that Commons is a mess in many places right now. Are there any plans to hire
him for a Commons makeover? What exactly did he propose we improve? Have those
improvements been published and discussed?

Regards,

ChrisiPK



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[Gerard Meijssen-3]

Hoi,
There is a meeting of "Commons" people in Paris in November.. so Commons is
not forgotten. The issue is that it makes sense to finnish things. One of my
biggest frustrations is how long things take. It is for this reason that I
am so pleased with the Usability Initiative because it regularly produces
results. It is not an unending wait for whatever reason.

There is considerable stress to get Flagged Revisions rolled out. Let us get
it over and done with so that we can move to other things.. for instance
improvements to Commons..

FYI I have an interest in improving several things for Commons. Some things
are waiting for adoption for over a year and I am not done waiting.
Thanks,
     GerardM

2009/10/16 ChrisiPK <chrisipk@...>

> Erik Moeller wrote:
> > We met Howie during our search for the Multimedia Usability Product
> > Manager position, and were impressed by his background, particularly
> > with regard to user focused product development, and some great first
> > thoughts he sent us on how to improve the usability of Wikimedia
> > Commons.
>
> So right now, they are only hired to roll out flagged revs on en.wp. I
> think
> that improvements to Commons are at least as vital as en.wp problems,
> seeing
> that Commons is a mess in many places right now. Are there any plans to
> hire
> him for a Commons makeover? What exactly did he propose we improve? Have
> those
> improvements been published and discussed?
>
> Regards,
>
> ChrisiPK
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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[Aryeh Gregor]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 8:43 AM, ChrisiPK <chrisipk@...> wrote:
> So right now, they are only hired to roll out flagged revs on en.wp. I think
> that improvements to Commons are at least as vital as en.wp problems, seeing
> that Commons is a mess in many places right now.

I don't know any more about the decision than you do, but I would
point out that a) FlaggedRevs is all coded and ready for deployment,
unlike most Commons features that are desired; and b) Wikimedia has
made a quite public commitment to deploy FlaggedRevs soon, unlike any
Commons features.  It's not like Commons has been ignored, anyway --
the new-upload branch should greatly benefit Commons, from what I've
heard.  It's just apparently not ready for deployment yet.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone for poking people about
improvements to Commons here, of course.  I'm sure more work should be
put into Commons.  But at this precise moment, prioritizing this one
specific enwiki feature seems to make sense.

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[ChrisiPK]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> There is considerable stress to get Flagged Revisions rolled out. Let us get
> it over and done with so that we can move to other things.. for instance
> improvements to Commons..

I was not arguing that we delay Flagged Revs for Commons' sake, I was only
interested whether Commons would also get some hired councilors (or whatever
they are). Sorry if that was how my post read. I'm surprised anyway that it
takes two employees to deploy a feature which other projects have implemented
with community consensus only and without official support, but that's not at
issue here.

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> FYI I have an interest in improving several things for Commons. Some things
> are waiting for adoption for over a year and I am not done waiting.

So do I and I think we need to make some sort of summary what we actually want
to do. I have tried this by creating a proposal on the strategy wiki[1], but
there has not been an awful lot of input over there. If you know a better
place where such discussion should take place, please let me know.
Also some sort of watchlist would be nice where suggested improvemets are
listed, among with improvements awaiting implementation and so on.

Thanks and regards,

ChrisiPK



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[Alex Zaddach]

Erik Moeller wrote:

> All,
>
> this is a quick note to let you know that we've signed on two people,
> William Pietri and Howie Fung, to help us on a contract basis with the
> deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia.
>
> William is an IT consultant and systems/software engineer; see his
> userpage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri --
> he is also a long-time Wikipedian. He will support the overall
> roll-out coordination and requirements planning.
>
> Howie is an experienced Product Manager who previously worked with
> Real Networks/Rhapsody and PayPal; see LinkedIn profile here:
> <http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=3830901>.
>
> We met Howie during our search for the Multimedia Usability Product
> Manager position, and were impressed by his background, particularly
> with regard to user focused product development, and some great first
> thoughts he sent us on how to improve the usability of Wikimedia
> Commons. Given his background, we thought it would be great to have
> his help in doing some more systematic analysis of usability,
> terminology and workflow issues with the proposed English Wikipedia
> roll-out.
>
> We are eager to roll out the "Flagged Protection" functionality soon.
> As Howie and William get up to speed, they'll post info on remaining
> work, and get community feedback on what's vital to have before the
> first release.

What exactly is William going to be doing? From what I understood, all
of the coding work is basically done and enwiki has settled on a
configuration (and if there is coding work to do, it seems like it would
make more sense to hire someone who is already familiar with the
FlaggedRevs/MediaWiki code).

As far as usability goes, FlaggedRevs has been in use on other large
projects (German Wikipedia, English Wikinews) for quite a while now, and
I know the eventual goal has been to have this on the English Wikipedia,
why did we wait until now to start studying this?

This seems like it has the potential to introduce even more delays into
something that people are already impatient for.

--
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)

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[Platonides]

ChrisiPK wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>> FYI I have an interest in improving several things for Commons. Some things
>> are waiting for adoption for over a year and I am not done waiting.
>
> So do I and I think we need to make some sort of summary what we actually want
> to do. I have tried this by creating a proposal on the strategy wiki[1], but
> there has not been an awful lot of input over there. If you know a better
> place where such discussion should take place, please let me know.
> Also some sort of watchlist would be nice where suggested improvemets are
> listed, among with improvements awaiting implementation and so on.
>
> Thanks and regards,
>
> ChrisiPK

There is http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bugs listing a good
number of things that we want.
If Howie is going to work "improving commons" I hope him to cut down
that list, instead of working on a new feature that he thought might be
neat.
I'm not trying to discourage new ideas, they wouldprobably be good. But
I see that the Foundation POV of the issues needing tech attention is
often different than the one seen from the community, since the work for
many hires surprise me. For example, I don't think that working on
LiquidThreads would have been pointed as a priority by many members (the
current system is "not too broken").
Strategy intends to learn which things are important, but just having a
developer coming to the Village Pump to implement whatever the local
community needs [and is reasonable] could make a difference. It wouldn't
be appropiate for Big Changes, but would give an easy say for many small
changes that may simply annoy them. Making volunteers happy is
important, too.



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[Erik Moeller-4]

2009/10/16 Alex <mrzmanwiki@...>:
> What exactly is William going to be doing?

For one thing, hand-hold the process until the technology is rolled
out, since there is nobody else internally who can actually devote any
attention to it - Brion just left the organization, so we have a CTO
vacancy to fill, plus several other key vacancies, and an upcoming
fundraiser, etc. The project needs focused attention.

Secondly, while the technology is basically feature-complete at least
for the flagged protection part, the configuration used on en.wp is
unique: it's a per-page approach to FlaggedRevs. The flagged
protection functionality was integrated into the page protection UI by
Aaron just very recently, for example, and we need to systematically
assess things like labels, icons, and workflows together with the
community, which will require a few further changes to the extension
as well. Again, this is about coordinating this process.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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[Erik Moeller-4]

2009/10/16 ChrisiPK <chrisipk@...>:
> So right now, they are only hired to roll out flagged revs on en.wp. I think
> that improvements to Commons are at least as vital as en.wp problems, seeing
> that Commons is a mess in many places right now. Are there any plans to hire
> him for a Commons makeover?

As per

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Ford_Foundation_Grant_July_2009

we have a $300,000 project underway to improve the usability of
Wikimedia Commons. We've just about wrapped up the hiring process for
it, and will make an announcement soon. Please note that Howie and
William are contractors, not full-time employees; they're supporting
FlaggedRevs on a part-time basis, and Howie will also provide some
support to the Commons project.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Erik Moeller-4]

2009/10/16 Platonides <Platonides@...>:
> Strategy intends to learn which things are important, but just having a
> developer coming to the Village Pump to implement whatever the local
> community needs [and is reasonable] could make a difference.

I agree that we need a healthy mix of project-based work (where we
identify priorities together, but WMF ultimately needs to make a call
of where it wants to focus its resources) and reactive work that is
about fixing or assigning small bugs, integrating existing
community-built extensions or making toolserver hacks into core
functionality, reviewing code, etc. This is why in addition to larger
scale project-based work and project contracts, we also are growing
our core team. The recently posted Code Maintenance Engineer position
falls into the core team category:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Code_Maintenance_Engineer

We have additional positions budgeted later in the year, and if the
fundraiser performs according to plan, we'll continue to expand both
project and core capacity. I think even if WMF were 10 times as large
as it is, though, we'd still have many of the same conversations about
"why this thing and not the other thing" all the time - probably more,
because there'd be more resources to compete for. :-)
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Michael Dale-4]

Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> [snip]
> It's not like Commons has been ignored, anyway --
> the new-upload branch should greatly benefit Commons, from what I've
> heard.  It's just apparently not ready for deployment yet.
>  
... here is a quick update...

New upload branch has been deployed for a few weeks now. You can take
advantage of some of its feature set with the mwEmbed gadgets:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/new-media-features-gadget/

I hope to transition those gadgets to be 'enabled by default' or
'opt-in' as part of the usability efforts. Not sure how that will work yet.

The next big things coming up:

a) enabling copy-by-url uploads on commons then in-line insert from
remote repositories and in-line uploading can be exposed as seen on
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/sandbox.2/Main_Page

b) getting a api-iframe-proxy in-place so you can do those in-line
uploads and remote inserts into commons from any edit page on
*.wikipedia or arbitrary approved remote domains.

Also aim to polish up the ogg derivatives extension 'wikiAtHome'. Also
in the nearish future I should be working on sequencer support,
multi-lingual timed text for video subtitles / annotations, SVG
parametrization, and finishing up the javascript language packaging
system support for template parameters ( early version here:
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/s-2/js2/mwEmbed/tests/testLang.html (only
English showed but some progress has been made on a general cldr
interpreter)

More general overview of media projects efforts is available here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Media_Projects_Overview

peace,
michael

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[William Pietri]

Hi, folks! Erik already answered this, but I wanted to add one bit.

Alex wrote:
> What exactly is William going to be doing? [...]
>
> This seems like it has the potential to introduce even more delays into
> something that people are already impatient for.
>  

That's a very reasonable worry, but I don't think that will be the case.

Aaron will continue to do any coding[1], and my goal is to maximize the
amount of time he can spend actually doing that. Partly by handling the
communication with the community, and partly by turning that, plus
Howie's usability recommendations, into a queue of clear, precise
feature requests.

In addition, I'm hoping we can split the future work into a series of
releases, rather than one big one. That will let us get the core part
out as soon as possible. Not only will that benefit readers and the
community, but feedback and data from real-world usage will help make
future releases better.

William

[1] If I end up with extra cycles, I'd love to write some automated
tests for this to hook into the existing test suite. The usage by the en
and de wikis is divergent enough that it seems like there's a real risk
of accidentally breaking something, and I'd rather have the computer do
my worrying for me. I aim to stay out of the production code, though.

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[Aryeh Gregor]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:26 PM, William Pietri <william@...> wrote:
> [1] If I end up with extra cycles, I'd love to write some automated
> tests for this to hook into the existing test suite.

What existing test suite?

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[William Pietri]

Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:26 PM, William Pietri <william@...> wrote:
>  
>> [1] If I end up with extra cycles, I'd love to write some automated
>> tests for this to hook into the existing test suite.
>>    
>
> What existing test suite?

Well, looking here, I see a column for "Tests":

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki

I figure that means there are some tests in the code base and a
continuous integration server that runs them. And I see at least a brief
mention of testing here:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker#Testing

If anybody has more info, though, I'm all ears.

William


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[^demon]

You know...that /tests directory. It always keeps fooling
people into thinking we keep unit tests there ;-)

-Chad

On Oct 16, 2009 2:29 PM, "Aryeh Gregor"
<Simetrical+wikilist@...<Simetrical%2Bwikilist@...>>
wrote:

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:26 PM, William Pietri <william@...> wrote:
> [1] If I end up with ...
What existing test suite?

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[^demon]

Right now the only test we run is the parser tests which
is just a big list of expected input/output for the parser.
It's by no means complete and only covers the parser.

The stuff in /t and /tests should be ignored...as they're
wildly out of date and completely unmaintaned.

-Chad

On Oct 16, 2009 2:35 PM, "William Pietri" <william@...> wrote:

Aryeh Gregor wrote: > On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:26 PM, William Pietri <
william@...> wrote: >...
Well, looking here, I see a column for "Tests":

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki

I figure that means there are some tests in the code base and a
continuous integration server that runs them. And I see at least a brief
mention of testing here:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker#Testing

If anybody has more info, though, I'm all ears.

William

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[Robert Rohde]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Platonides <Platonides@...> wrote:

> ChrisiPK wrote:
>> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>>> FYI I have an interest in improving several things for Commons. Some things
>>> are waiting for adoption for over a year and I am not done waiting.
>>
>> So do I and I think we need to make some sort of summary what we actually want
>> to do. I have tried this by creating a proposal on the strategy wiki[1], but
>> there has not been an awful lot of input over there. If you know a better
>> place where such discussion should take place, please let me know.
>> Also some sort of watchlist would be nice where suggested improvemets are
>> listed, among with improvements awaiting implementation and so on.
>>
>> Thanks and regards,
>>
>> ChrisiPK
>
> There is http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bugs listing a good
> number of things that we want.
> If Howie is going to work "improving commons" I hope him to cut down
> that list, instead of working on a new feature that he thought might be
> neat.
> I'm not trying to discourage new ideas, they wouldprobably be good. But
> I see that the Foundation POV of the issues needing tech attention is
> often different than the one seen from the community, since the work for
> many hires surprise me. For example, I don't think that working on
> LiquidThreads would have been pointed as a priority by many members (the
> current system is "not too broken").
> Strategy intends to learn which things are important, but just having a
> developer coming to the Village Pump to implement whatever the local
> community needs [and is reasonable] could make a difference. It wouldn't
> be appropiate for Big Changes, but would give an easy say for many small
> changes that may simply annoy them. Making volunteers happy is
> important, too.

Rather than having developers visit village pumps on various projects,
it would be good for a standard and well-advertised technical forum to
be set up somewhere (mediawiki.org, meta) to discuss feature requests
from the community and help communicate community desires and
priorities to the developer community.  Bugzilla sort of serves that
purpose now, but I know that many people are intimidated by that
format and it isn't well suited for general consensus gauging
discussions.

-Robert Rohde

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[William Pietri]

Hi, Chad. Thanks for the help.

Chad wrote:
> Right now the only test we run is the parser tests which
> is just a big list of expected input/output for the parser.
> It's by no means complete and only covers the parser.
>  

That's interesting. Some tests are better than no tests, for sure.

Luckily, we have a giant corpus of known-good inputs and outputs, so it
would be fun to do some mutation testing to find the holes in the parser
coverage. At a conference yesterday I asked around to see if anybody had
heard of a mutation testing tool (like http://jester.sourceforge.net/)
for PHP and regexes, but alas, nobody had.

If somebody gets interested in that, let me know, and I'm glad to dig
further.

> The stuff in /t and /tests should be ignored...as they're
> wildly out of date and completely unmaintaned.

Good to know. If I get to the point where I have time to write tests,
I'll ask here further about the best way to go about it.

William

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[Aryeh Gregor]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:35 PM, William Pietri <william@...> wrote:
> And I see at least a brief mention of testing here:
>
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker#Testing

I've updated that to be more accurate.

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[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Chad <innocentkiller@...> wrote:
> The stuff in /t and /tests should be ignored...as they're
> wildly out of date and completely unmaintaned.
>
I suggest that we svn rm them, because they are only tricking people
into thinking we have a testing framework.


Bryan

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