Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/Technology report


 * Ed. note: this talk page was cleared after publication, per our usual practice. Comments made before publication are available [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-03-11/Technology_report&oldid=543595929 here]. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 07:26, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Article Feedback tool
It's good to see that the WMF has listened to the feedback it received about this tool through the RFC. This was a worthwhile experiment, but IMO it didn't work and it's good that it's going to be changed to opt-in. Nick-D (talk) 07:22, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

LUA templates
Whilst there are over 80 templates in Category:Lua-based templates, it should be noted that about 20 of these are sandboxes of their parent templates, plus one or two user sandboxes, leaving about 60 legitimate templates. An  optimist  on the  run!   08:17, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification. - Jarry1250 [Vacation needed] 14:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Code review
I can understand why you focus on the first review rather than on the final result (rejection or merge), but I'm not so sure of this WMF vs. non-WMF distinction, because I think the point should rather be how good we are at bringing flesh blood. We'd need a third line for non staff (please try to include WMDE in staff), non-mediawiki patches: non-WMF staff teams may skew the numbers, as well as core volunteer developers (whose patches' quality is probably, on average, better than the WMF's, given the higher and longer MediaWiki experience they often have, although more are being added lately). As for the merges, the number of open commits is still increasing (as far as I can see), and 80 % of them are non-WMF. --Nemo 09:24, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Historically, the staff vs. non-staff distinction has been the one that has been the one most prominent in arguments in various fora, which is why I focus on it . The argument that a few volunteer developers have networked sufficiently to improve their review times to the level of staff has been put before (e.g. by Amgine) and I will look into testing it for next week.
 * The number of open commits is not a particularly useful measure under Gerrit, because if you've got a review, it's up to you to do something. At the moment, we have no idle timeout, and there is no reason to have one. - Jarry1250 [Vacation needed] 14:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
 * You're right on everything except that your analysis doesn't measure staff vs. non-staff but rather WMF vs. non-WMF, which is similar but not equivalent. For open commits, the figure above doesn't change if you consider only open commits without reviews (which is probably the recommended measure, see Gerrit/Navigation). --Nemo 14:32, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I would also be interested in open commits. While I do not have a full knowledge how code review works, I am having a patch submitted myself which hasnt got a final review for almost a month...--Kozuch (talk) 10:48, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

MoodBar
"the outcomes can only be demoralising from a developer standpoint" -- I wouldn't assume that. In fact, I would definitely ask folks on the Product and Engineering teams what their opinion was before speaking for them. Some of us do love MoodBar and the Feedback Dashboard (I helped start the response team) but part of being professionals in software development is that you can't be afraid to kill your babies, if you catch my drift. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   18:24, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, "outcomes": I was including AFTv5 in that (not sure if you noted that). I think it's inferable enough from various developer comments that undeploying AFTv5 was demoralising. Not necessarily very demoralising – as you say, being a professional means having to accept the odd reversal – but demoralising nonetheless, especially on AFTv5 where it was never really deployed in the first place. Disappointing, you know. That said, I welcome contrary comments which can be posted here or sent privately to me via my username @gmail.com . I will do my best to run them next week. Thanks, - Jarry1250 [Vacation needed] 14:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I have to say i do not find the writing in this piece to be the type of objective reporting expected of a news source. There seem to be several opinions, such as the moodbar "filling an even more obvious need", a statement which the authors did not even bother to explain, and obvious speculation about the possible motives of the community in rejecting these features. I went back and re read that secion trying to figure out if you were just quoting someone as it seemed more like a bunch of opinions there in the last paragraph. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:20, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry you don't like the style, Beeblebrox. To answer your specific points, of course there is an amount of speculation about motives: this is completely typical of any news outlet. People care about motivations, and yet they can only ever be inferred from what people say and do (in this case the AFTv5 RFC) and I'm happy to take corrections. And yup, I did get some analysis in there in the last paragraph, but phrased overtly as such. To expand upon the need point, it's been long established that new users have historically been under-supported and lack communications pathways. Or do you disagree? - Jarry1250 [Vacation needed] 19:05, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

AFT on request
So I take it from this we can place AFT on certain articles on an opt-in basis... is there a page with more detail on how to do this somewhere? -- phoebe / (talk to me) 03:25, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
 * The first link to the EE mailing list may be of assistance. - Jarry1250 [Vacation needed] 14:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
 * To answer this question for the lazy, including me :) -- the newsletter says: "Going forward, editors who wish to enable AFT5 on articles they watch can simply add 'Category:Article_Feedback_5' to these articles -- and the feedback form will automatically appear at the bottom of these pages." -- phoebe / (talk to me) 19:05, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

AFT question
Will there be automatic anti-spam, anti-abuse measures on opt-in articles containing AFT? --74.202.39.3 (talk) 22:18, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

AFT from watchlist
I used to be able to see all the feedback from all my watchlisted articles using a link off my watchlist to Special%3AArticleFeedbackv5Watchlist. But that doesn't seem to work anymore. Is it gone forever? --99of9 (talk) 06:15, 20 March 2013 (UTC)