Talk:Wikimedia monthly activities meetings/Quarterly reviews/Growth/June 2014

Re: "have functioning draft namespace on enwiki"

I thought that was a community-implemented initiative (initially opposed by WMF). --Nemo 11:39, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Pinging @MZMcBride so he can request compensation from the WMF for the work he's put into this Foundation initiative. odder (talk) 11:47, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I can't speak for Steven and his team here, but doesn't the linked commit merely contain the configuration changes that MZ himself described as quite trivial in the associated bug? ("Probably a few more than two lines to create the namespace, the talk namespace, and set noindex. Maybe a half-dozen to a dozen lines? In any case, this seems fairly easy to implement to me.") If I'm not misunderstanding, Steven's point back then was that beyond flipping these switches, it also needed actual coding and design work for the UX, which the WMF Growth team went on to provide in the following weeks before it was rolled out.

And, as you may have since found yourself by reading a few lines further in the minutes, it was clearly stated in the meeting that this had been requested by the enwiki community. As a general caution, while it makes me very happy to see that these minutes are actually being read and generate discussions, it's always possible that something important was left out or mangled in the process of note-taking, see the warning in italics at the top.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

To expand on what Tilman said... if you look at the patch in question, you'll note that by December when the stuff was actually merged, the patch had been taken over by Matt Flaschen on Growth. We did feature coding, extensive testing, announcements, responding to questions/comments and more to get this out the door. Max got the ball rolling, and I definitely don't think we would have done it before 2014 without him pushing. But that doesn't mean we didn't work on it. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 06:55, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Re: "Toby: may be possible to find some causality in metrics"

Yes please. Especially needed in order to benefit, as byproduct, all the things WMF doesn't do or research directly (that is, 99 %?).

Especially Wikimedia projects other than $$Wikipedia$$ need to understand themselves and take care of their development: for instance I care a lot about Italian Wikiquote and Italian Wiktionary but nobody else does (except our millions visitors); we clearly have to figure it out ourselves (and without a budget). --Nemo 12:40, 14 June 2014 (UTC)