AKosiaris (WMF)

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Greek translation

I copied your translation from this email to User:Pine/WMYHTW translations/el. Thanks very much for the Greek translation. --Pine (✉) 23:05, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for letting me know. Nice work! AKosiaris (WMF) (talk) 07:49, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

On the venting of frustrations

Regarding T337649; my apologies again if that came across as venting. It wasn't intended to be.

But since we're on the topic… if pretty much all relevant technical groups within the WMF are both aware of this issue (technical debt and lack of stewardship for the multimedia stack, I mean, not this single problem) and agree it is something that needs to be properly addressed (in a broad sense), it is rather remarkable that it is not possible for them to communicate this fact to WMF management and be understood. From external appearances this speaks of organisational dysfunction.

From my perspective it is also a fact that WMF management have very effectively insulated themselves from the contributors creating the content driving the donations. I know of no way to actually raise such issues with them, nor do I have any faith in their ability to actually comprehend what I wrote. The normal channel for such is through the technical staff in the organization, but from all external appearances they have managed to insulate themselves from that as well.

So, I feel for you all, I really do, being in the squeeze that you are. But if technical staff cannot get through in internal channels, there is really no chance any individual community member can (and half of enWP showing up with torches and pitchforks is more likely to be "handled" than actually addressed).

That is a long term and ongoing frustration I feel I must vent every now and again. Congratulations, you were the winner of it this time around. :) Xover (talk) 10:25, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for this message.

I am not gonna disagree with almost anything that you point out, but 1 thing. The picture you are painting was accurate, but is slowly changing for the better. New management is more attentive and listening more. Some internal organizational process are already changing for the better, taking engineer input into account now as well. IMHO, they have a lot of work ahead of them to address the dysfunctions and quite a bit of risk but something's happening at least. It's gonna take quite a while to show results in the areas you are possibly more interested in and I guess that won't address the long term frustration anytime soon, but I can hope it will happen.

Thanks for venting here and not in phabricator by the way. I share (at least part of) the frustration and it isn't easy venting it. AKosiaris (WMF) (talk) 13:45, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

There's no great risk of me running out of frustrations with the WMF any time soon (I'll spare you the non-techy bits; the list is looong), but if the engineering situation is improving I am very very happy to be wrong about that!

I'll take it as a good sign that CentralAuth finally has an owner, and if someone takes ownership of the multimedia stack at some point we have some fundamentals in place at least. My personal big pain points in the platform remaining are Gadgets (2.0 or otherwise) and TemplateStyles / css-sanitizer (all critical components for on-wiki technical contributors that never make it in other teams' priorities). It seems strange to me (makes little sense financially too) not to leverage the heck out of the long tail of on-wiki technical contributors. Give them the tools and they'll work for free to extend the platform and make non-technical contributors more productive and happy.

In addition it is incomprehensible to me that the WMF has not a single person employed whose responsibility it is to "own" Wikisource. That's a hundred plus projects with not a single person responsible. Even if it is just a technical liaison-type role, not having at least one person responsible for each of the groups of sisters (Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc.) seems really odd. We in some cases don't even manage to get volunteer patches +2'ed in Extension:Wikisource and Extension:Proofread Page because it's nobody's job to own those components that are absolutely critical to all the Wikisourcen.

There will always be resource constraints that limit what can be done and how fast, but just having an owner for at least most critical components would, IMO, improve things far out of proportion to the cost. When nobody owns a component there's nobody to argue for it when priorities are set, and nobody to keep track of its state and needs.

In any case, thanks for putting up with me venting. And here's hoping things are heading in the right direction! Xover (talk) 15:32, 13 September 2023 (UTC)