User talk:Geo Swan/Jay Douglas (reggae)

Goldarn stupid wizards!
Wow. It turns out I prepared a userspace draft, and a year later prepared a version in article space.

I blame the WMF's development team, who have wildly naive and wasteful ideas as to what novices need. They took the perfectly useful long-standing behavior, for when tries to open a red-link, and replaced it with a "wizard".

Like earlier whiz-bang wizards this wizard was crippling for experienced users, and, I strongly suspect, of almost zero utility to novices.

Rather than inform the novice user as to whether they were trying to recreate an article that had once been deleted, a link to search for other articles that include the title, which could help find already existing articles, under slight variations in spelling, capitalization, or punctuation, or offering a link to "what links here", and offering a link to allow the contributor to make notes in userspace, it tries to press-gang the contributor to prepare a draft in the draft space.

I wish I could wring those developers necks.

As I noted WMF developers "helped" us with absolutely dreadfully terrible wizards in the past. They developed an image upload wizard that is criminally broken. That upload wizard's only improvement over uploading images by filling in an image information template would have been that it might ease the effort required to upload multiple images that shared a license, an author, a source url, date, etc... But the goldarn thing is fragile, as a snowflake, and crashes, before complettion. In my experience the goldarn thing crashes, before task completion, over half the time.

When it works, does it save time? NO!, not really. And, when it crashes, does it crash, gracefully? NO! The contributor has to complete several steps. The wizard is not written in html, it is written in some kind of scripting language. Which means your browser's back button will not take you to the previous stage, if the goldarn thing crashes. If they had to use some kind of scripting language, why write it as a huge and destructive monolith? Why not have multiple html pages, one for each stage, which each called its own script. That way, if one stage failed, you wouldn't have to start over at square one?

And how the heck did they come to put such an unstable mess in production, in the first place?

Sheesh! Geo Swan (talk) 15:16, 21 April 2017 (UTC)