Flow - the next Visual Editor debacle

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Fri Sep 05, 2014 8:58 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:I'm sanguine about this. There is a lot of pushing and shoving but thanks to the resolute effort of De-WP I think that the result is a stalemate rather than the resounding WMF victory that would have made Flow an inevitability.
If WMF is forced to prove that piece of shit WORKS before they can install it, they never will.

You may be wiser than me. We should book a porch upon which to sip our mint juleps in 12 months time, when we can look back on it all, and say "See...[insert result]"

I still think they're going a step too far here. We'll see.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 12:55 pm

Reading between the lines, I think Flow may be less of a done deal than I thought it was... Here is

Erik Möller's History of Flow

Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2014 21:49:10 -0700
From: Erik Moeller
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow

Hi all,

I'm breaking out this discussion about Flow/talk pages (apologies for repeatedly breaking the megathread, but this is a well-scoped subject which deserves its own thread).

Fundamentally, there's one key question to answer for talk pages in Wikimedia projects: Do we want discussions to occur in document mode, or in a structured comment mode? All else flows from there (pun intended).

Document mode

There are not many examples of document mode discussion systems beyond wikis. You sometimes see people use collaborative realtime editors as such, because people want to talk in the same space where they work, but Google Docs provided alternatives (a pretty powerful comments/margin system and built-in chat) early on, for example.

The current talk page system is a document mode system. Individual comments have unclear boundaries (a single transaction can result in multiple comments, signed or unsigned; indentation levels are unpredictable and often inconsistent). All the joys and pain points of working on the same document are present (a heavily trafficked talk page will see many edit conflicts). You can't easily show comments in multiple contexts (cross-wiki, via email, as a notification, etc.) because of the boundary problem.

You could try to make a document mode system work better. On the basis of wikitext, you can do some very basic things, like the "new section" link I added to MediaWiki back in July 2003 [1], when I wrote: "This feature could also be the first stage of a more sophisticated discussion system, where the next stage would be auto-appending signatures and providing a 'Reply to this' link after each comment."

But due to the aforementioned unpredictability, even making a "reply" link work consistently (and do the right thing) is non-trivial. You can get some of the way there, and the Wikipedia Teahouse actually has a gadget, written by Andrew Garrett (more on him below) that does precisely that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... /Questions

Note the "Join this discussion" link. It does give you a pop-up, and posts the comment for you in the right place, with indentation (it does not auto-sign, but instead tries to teach users the signature habit which they'll need to use on other talk pages).

It may be worth doing more research and development on this, to see just how far we can get without changing the fundamentals, since a wholly new system may still be years out for wide use. However, there are inherent limitations due to the lack of a predictable and consistent structure. [Emphasis added. —t.d.]

You could go further down the road of a document mode or hybrid system, but IMO not without introducing fully predictable comment markers (think <comment id="234234">Bla ~~~</comment>) -- which would pollute the wikitext, be fragile (e.g. accidental or deliberate corruption of identifiers), and probably be considered unacceptable in a system that still supports unlimited wikitext editing for those reasons.

Structured

I personally gave up on patchwork on top of talk pages about 10 years ago. The advantages of having comments clearly identified as such are many:

• Display comments in arbitrary order, arbitrary threading style
• Search comments across date ranges
• Search comments by author
• Track comments as comments, not as diffs
• Monitor changes at any part of a comment thread
• Display comments independent of a given document (e.g. email, cross-wiki, etc.)
• Display comment metadata in different formats easily (e.g. timestamps)
• Update author names after a username change without having to update documents
• Enables third parties to build new UIs (think Wikiwand for comments) more easily
• Ability to tag/categorize individual comments/threads
• and more.

I identified some of these reasons when I wrote the proposal for LiquidThreads in October 2004 [2]. At that point, the Wikimedia Foundation had 0 employees, and this was too large an effort to likely get traction just from ad hoc volunteering. So after some time, I managed to persuade third parties to fund development, including Wikicities and WikiEducator, and found a developer to do the initial work, David McCabe. David did a good initial job but the system had many known issues and was only deployed at a small scale.

At the same time, I think there were many things about even the original design that were good (and aren't found in most other forum systems):

• It preserved "headers" on top of the threaded conversation as community-editable wiki-like spaces
• It had a full history model for the thread itself, not just comments
• It preserved comments essentially as individual wiki pages, with their own history
• It had a built-in notion of thread summaries, collaboratively written, for closing comments

As WMF started to grow, it took on development of LiquidThreads — with one developer, Andrew Garrett, who did an amazing job cleaning up the codebase and rethinking many of the assumptions David had made. LQT got to a point where some Wikimedia wikis actually requested for it to be enabled and traction started to build in favor of it. To this date, it is still found in some nooks and crannies in the Wikimedia universe.

translatewiki.net still uses it for its support page, and MediaWiki.org for its support desk, which are probably the highest profile uses left, and both get a fair bit of comment traffic.

Andrew did a ton of work on the project, but he himself recognized many architectural issues he wanted to address, and there are also UI assumptions we wanted to revisit. The project didn't have a team behind it at that time — just one very talented part-time developer who was still at university! This was when WMF was barely growing to do development work, picking up some stuff (like LQT and FlaggedRevs) that had been simmering at a smaller scale before then.

In 2011, Brandon Harris, the first person at WMF ever to be tasked exclusively with design responsibilities, took a crack at some initial redesign drafts [5][6], which still contain many ideas worth looking at. But we pulled the plug at that time, because we recognized that we simply didn't have the personpower to put the resources behind the project to actually get it anywhere near completion -- and that a major architectural overhaul was required to do so.

A new effort was launched about a year ago, now resourcing a full team including design, development, product management, community support. (We're still pretty short staffed on UX research, QA, and data analyst support, but we make do.) As the team (including Andrew with his LQT experience under his belt) thought through the architectural needs of a modern discussion system, they decided that the LQT architecture was not salvageable. A migration script [7] is in development by Andrew himself.

The Flow architecture [8] differs in some important ways from LQT, including:

• Flow doesn't pretend that comments are "pages", instead using its own separate tables to manage them. This is architecturally important to give us more flexibility on how to store, version, query, search, and describe comments.
• Flow is built from the start to store comments in a central datastore, to make it easier to display comments and relevant notifications cross-wiki.
• Flow users Parsoid's HTML underneath, to prepare it for VisualEditor.

I don't think the architecture is perfect, but it should be a reasonable foundation to build on and iterate from.

The Flow UI, similarly, represents a first pass at this point. A lot of basic functionality is still missing. Things we know will make users happy (like cross-wiki features) are still ways out. It doesn't support VisualEditor yet, and yet its wikitext input suffers from any issues Parsoid does -- decisions made to future-proof the architecture have negative short term impact.

And like any brand-new UI, it could use lots of micro-optimization — glitches here and there, which you may not even consciously notice, but which give you the feeling that you're using not-quite-ready software. Which you are.

At the same time, we know from user studies that talk pages are incredibly hard for new users to figure out. The semantics are just extremely different from anything else on the web. So we think a support forum like the Teahouse, and its equivalent in other languages may be a good place to start — provided the hosts agree that there are no dealbreaker issues for them. This parallels the long adoption of LQT for support desk type forums.

In this context, we also want to do some systematic measurement: How does such a system affect the # of comments posted, and the quality of the discussion?

We expect that we'd need to focus in on this use case in production for quite some time to get it right and really get people to fall in love with the system as it improves. At the same time, there may be other use cases that are less contentious and could serve as additional trials — like talk pages in Wikidata.

We're not pushing an aggressive schedule on Flow — we understand it needs to happen at the pace of the communities, since you can't build an "opt-out" for this kind of system (unlike VisualEditor). So the schedule is going to have to give as needed. [Emphasis added. —TD]

And as above, I'm open to us putting some short term effort into talk page improvements that can be made without Flow -- knowing it's still some time out. But based on the above long term functional and architectural considerations, I think a system that treats comments/threads as structured information, rather than as documents, is ultimately necessary, so I'd argue against procrastinating. It's going to be hard enough as it is to get this done without putting it on the backburner once more.

Finally, any comment that is about specific Flow UI aspects should be treated with a massive block of salt. The UI will evolve dramatically as we learn what works for new and experienced users alike.

Sincerely,
Erik

[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/w ... 11069.html
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? ... did=100760
[3] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Support
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Support_desk
[5] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... e-Full.png
[6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0/Design
[7] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/119243/
[8] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Architecture
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 2:19 pm

Interesting. One can only assume Lila pulled him aside and said 'we are not releasing this crap until it works and does something we need'. Maybe I was wrong and she can make an improvement

In other news, Erik goes crying to ANI about Fram being mean. Doesn't seem to find many friends...

Unless Erik plans to take a WMF Staff action, then no other action is going to result here. We arn't going to block/desysop Fram over a threat. An actual block by Fram may result in something wholly different though - who knows? Erik should probably take the results here as a sign that his current deployment strategies don't have a whole lot of support and he won't find a tremendous amount of sympathy from the community. Efforts to strengthen the relationship between the WMF and the Community should be sought - clearly what happened on both sides hasn't improved anything.--v/r - TP 23:30, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Unread post by **Peter Damian** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 2:26 pm

@DangerousPanda: I hear you, and I was not arguing for that. I think it's important for other users to be aware that this is happening, so it doesn't just become an "us vs. them" conflict. We need to establish clear parameters for working together, and this kind of behavior would IMO be outside any reasonable parameters. I hope other users agree, and help de-escalate, in other venues as appropriate. Thanks,--Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 23:14, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Too late, it's already become another "us vs. them" conflict. Eric Corbett 23:23, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Flow is not a feature, Flow (as it stands now) is a bug. I like some of the new features (Echo comes to mind), but even that has been ruined by Flow now. But if you want to use Flow, you can use the community-accepted test pages that already existed, not the ones sneakily and against consensus introduced by DannyH and protected by Erik Möller. Fram (talk) 10:05, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

DanMurphy · Unread post by **DanMurphy** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 3:15 pm

I am moved to share a relevant video. Oh the golden victories, and the scarlet crimes!

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 5:20 pm

Always improving

This is software improvement, WMF style. One of the few "features" they've recently added which most folks like is Echo (notifications). After the initial kerfuffle where people didn't like the loss of their "Orange Bar" for new messages, Echo has settled in, and I think it's fair to say most people like it and even rely on it.

So... Flow breaks it...

Fram wrote:Yes, I have already noted above that it is completely ridiculous that messages (Flow notifications) are given more prominence than actual alerts, and that even when you have no new Flow messages, they are shown instead of the alerts. There has been no reply to that remark, just like to most pertinent remarks made here. Messages here about flaws, bugs, errors, ... are routinely ignored by the Flow developers and managers. Basically, all input gets ignored apart from the few things they like to hear

...

I'm now finding it very difficult to spot errant Flow-related alerts from genuine Echo alerts and have just realised that there were four of the latter awaiting my attention but which were masked in some way by two of the former. The only way they showed up was by clicking on the "display all alerts" link. This is becoming a real nuisance - can we not disable whatever change has been made until it is fixed? - Sitush (talk) 16:55, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

So, what's another very successful, universally used and loved wikimedia feature?

Yes, the watchlist. From the same conversation:

Plus, watching a Flow page doesn't give good results in the watchlist, as has been said countless times. So at the moment it is Echo or nothing.

Unread post by **HRIP7** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 5:25 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:Reading between the lines, I think Flow may be less of a done deal than I thought it was... Here is

Erik Möller's History of Flow

Erik has also posted this on-wiki here on the English Wikipedia's WT:Flow talk page.

In the German Wikipedia, Erik is now participating in discussions on the Kurier talk page.

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 5:50 pm

HRIP7 wrote: In the German Wikipedia, Erik is now participating in discussions on the Kurier talk page.

I really think he's been told to back off on deployment, and get out there and do some damage limitation/repair.

I love Google translate, too - from further down the page, someone is translated as saying:

IP user wrote:The more we hear from San Francisco, the clearer it seems to me to be that there the horse from the wrong end thereof is bridled.

Hex · Unread post by **Hex** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 6:15 pm

Erik Möller wrote: So after some time, I managed to persuade third parties to fund development, including Wikicities and WikiEducator, and found a developer to do the initial work, David McCabe. David did a good initial job but the system had many known issues and was only deployed at a small scale.

Ah yes, WikiEducator, who are reaping the benefits of Erik's work to this very day. On that topic, I might as well give you an exclusive preview of something I have on the go. Enjoy.

Development of LiquidThreads seems to have dried up at the beginning of 2008 following the conclusion of McCabe's funding period. However, in June, Möller — who had become Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation in January — sent a message to the WikiEducator list titled "LQT 2.0". In it, he informed the WikiEducators that McCabe had got in touch, saying he could work long-term on the project for the Foundation. So, would they provide feedback and information on things that needed to be done? What he didn't expect, however, was that his post would open the floodgates for a torrent of complaints and requests for not only user acceptance tests, but an option to selectively disable LiquidThreads. The comments were stinging. "LQT is probably the single main issue/reason I'm currently using Wikiversity over Wikieducator," complained one poster. "I see nothing wrong with innovation — bring it on. But there might also be something to be said for KISS — and elegance... if I can't easily converse on an educational wiki, for me, there is not much point," worried another.

The repeated requests for a per-page "toggle" for LiquidThreads, or its demise entirely, were met first by Möller with a reassurance of it being a community decision ("If WikEd wants to implement a per-page toggle or turn off LQT entirely, that is obviously its prerogative."), but later the same day he watered the commitment down, effectively informing the mailing list posters that their consensus was insufficient ("What I'd propose is a community review with a firm deadline, say, December 1 2008 as a start of the review process, and a decision made by January 1 2009."), and that they were not the right kind of users to be making the decision ("I would advise... trying to identify WE community members who potentially bring different perspectives to the table, e.g. a more newbie-focused perspective vs. that of the routine user..."). Anyone who's been following the development of new "flagship features" by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers since 2013 or so is forgiven any sense of déjà vu they may have at this point.

To be honest after my eighteen years in software development
I have never worked with someone who spends more time defending
a position (and thinking they are right) than they do listening to the
genuine frustrations and requests from a user community.
- Peter Rawsthorne, WikiEducator thread, 25 September 2008

Another mailing list thread began soon after with a similar tone, characterized by multiple serious user complaints ("i have barely touched a talk page since they were implemented. a real shame.") and stonewalling from Möller ("I have argued before, and continue to argue, for a period of time in which we improve the system based on user feedback, and _then_ a period of evaluation in which we consider the options for WE. Turning off the system now is disruptive, and makes it in fact harder to address the concerns and objections that have been voiced."). Frustrated by this apparent refusal to take their concerns seriously, WikiEducator users subsequently began to take matters into their own hands, with one "setting up sub pages as pseudo talk pages to get around this problem". However, Möller's position was backed by the project's founder, and so the status quo remained unchanged.

Kind of telling wouldn't you say, that so much of the discussion
re: LQT takes place on the 'mailing list' rather than on the wiki, so
that rather than being organized around a central page on LQT they're
lost in inboxes all over the world. The proliferation of such lists
coincides with the implementation of LQT.
- Brent Simpson, WikiEducator thread, 25 September 2008

The following month, the debate was reignited in a discussion thread on WikiEducator, where concerns were raised both about Möller's dismissive approach towards WikiEducator users requesting changes that he disagreed with, and the inconsistent and confusing way that he defined his role in relation to the site and development of the software. The discussion spilled back onto the "LQT 2.0" mailing list thread, where "a formal request to turn off Liquid Threads" was posted. It was fruitless.

At Wikimania I interrupted Möller in mid-conversation in order to say hello to a genuine real-world friend of mine that I hadn't seen for a while. That was fun. It was a mistake, though; what I should have done was snuck up behind him and tied his shoelaces together. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 6:50 pm

Jim wrote:I love Google translate, too - from further down the page, someone is translated as saying:
IP user wrote:The more we hear from San Francisco, the clearer it seems to me to be that there the horse from the wrong end thereof is bridled.

I think that's more effective than an idiomatic translation would be!

Kiefer.Wolfowitz · Unread post by **Kiefer.Wolfowitz** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 8:42 pm

Hex wrote:
Erik Möller wrote: So after some time, I managed to persuade third parties to fund development, including Wikicities and WikiEducator, and found a developer to do the initial work, David McCabe. David did a good initial job but the system had many known issues and was only deployed at a small scale.
Ah yes, WikiEducator, who are reaping the benefits of Erik's work to this very day. On that topic, I might as well give you an exclusive preview of something I have on the go. Enjoy.

Development of LiquidThreads seems to have dried up at the beginning of 2008 following the conclusion of McCabe's funding period. However, in June, Möller — who had become Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation in January — sent a message to the WikiEducator list titled "LQT 2.0". In it, he informed the WikiEducators that McCabe had got in touch, saying he could work long-term on the project for the Foundation. So, would they provide feedback and information on things that needed to be done? What he didn't expect, however, was that his post would open the floodgates for a torrent of complaints and requests for not only user acceptance tests, but an option to selectively disable LiquidThreads. The comments were stinging. "LQT is probably the single main issue/reason I'm currently using Wikiversity over Wikieducator," complained one poster. "I see nothing wrong with innovation — bring it on. But there might also be something to be said for KISS — and elegance... if I can't easily converse on an educational wiki, for me, there is not much point," worried another.

The repeated requests for a per-page "toggle" for LiquidThreads, or its demise entirely, were met first by Möller with a reassurance of it being a community decision ("If WikEd wants to implement a per-page toggle or turn off LQT entirely, that is obviously its prerogative."), but later the same day he watered the commitment down, effectively informing the mailing list posters that their consensus was insufficient ("What I'd propose is a community review with a firm deadline, say, December 1 2008 as a start of the review process, and a decision made by January 1 2009."), and that they were not the right kind of users to be making the decision ("I would advise... trying to identify WE community members who potentially bring different perspectives to the table, e.g. a more newbie-focused perspective vs. that of the routine user..."). Anyone who's been following the development of new "flagship features" by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers since 2013 or so is forgiven any sense of déjà vu they may have at this point.

To be honest after my eighteen years in software development
I have never worked with someone who spends more time defending
a position (and thinking they are right) than they do listening to the
genuine frustrations and requests from a user community.
- Peter Rawsthorne, WikiEducator thread, 25 September 2008

Another mailing list thread began soon after with a similar tone, characterized by multiple serious user complaints ("i have barely touched a talk page since they were implemented. a real shame.") and stonewalling from Möller ("I have argued before, and continue to argue, for a period of time in which we improve the system based on user feedback, and _then_ a period of evaluation in which we consider the options for WE. Turning off the system now is disruptive, and makes it in fact harder to address the concerns and objections that have been voiced."). Frustrated by this apparent refusal to take their concerns seriously, WikiEducator users subsequently began to take matters into their own hands, with one "setting up sub pages as pseudo talk pages to get around this problem". However, Möller's position was backed by the project's founder, and so the status quo remained unchanged.

Kind of telling wouldn't you say, that so much of the discussion
re: LQT takes place on the 'mailing list' rather than on the wiki, so
that rather than being organized around a central page on LQT they're
lost in inboxes all over the world. The proliferation of such lists
coincides with the implementation of LQT.
- Brent Simpson, WikiEducator thread, 25 September 2008

The following month, the debate was reignited in a discussion thread on WikiEducator, where concerns were raised both about Möller's dismissive approach towards WikiEducator users requesting changes that he disagreed with, and the inconsistent and confusing way that he defined his role in relation to the site and development of the software. The discussion spilled back onto the "LQT 2.0" mailing list thread, where "a formal request to turn off Liquid Threads" was posted. It was fruitless.

Excellent research and reporting, Hex.

This should be the centerpiece of a blog post that should focus media attention on the WMF and Erik Möller.
:obliterate:

SB_Johnny · Unread post by **SB_Johnny** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 11:23 pm

Hex wrote:
Erik Möller wrote: So after some time, I managed to persuade third parties to fund development, including Wikicities and WikiEducator, and found a developer to do the initial work, David McCabe. David did a good initial job but the system had many known issues and was only deployed at a small scale.
Ah yes, WikiEducator, who are reaping the benefits of Erik's work to this very day. On that topic, I might as well give you an exclusive preview of something I have on the go. Enjoy.

Awesome stuff, I look forward to seeing the rest of the something.

This reminds me of the rather hostile opinion some of the Wikiversity people held for Möller around that time, because he was plugging WE rather than WV, which were founded at about the same time. In fact, one of the big complaints was that WE was getting all sorts of great gadgets like Liquid Threads, while WV was getting very little support (software, moral, or otherwise) from the WMF, and in particular from Herr Möller.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 12:22 am

Hex wrote:Ah yes, WikiEducator, who are reaping the benefits of Erik's work to this very day. On that topic, I might as well give you an exclusive preview of something I have on the go. Enjoy.

Should I save this in the Flow article, or are you seriously going to put it on the WO blog?

Hex · Unread post by **Hex** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 2:52 am

EricBarbour wrote:
Hex wrote:Ah yes, WikiEducator, who are reaping the benefits of Erik's work to this very day. On that topic, I might as well give you an exclusive preview of something I have on the go. Enjoy.
Should I save this in the Flow article, or are you seriously going to put it on the WO blog?

This, and the rest of the 1,500-word article I took it from, are intended for the blog. I've been waiting for someone to get back to me about that.

Mason · Unread post by **Mason** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 3:05 am

Hex wrote:This, and the rest of the 1,500-word article I took it from, are intended for the blog.

Good. What you've posted so far is a very compelling read.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 3:49 am

Now this from Mr. Möller on the Wikimedia-l mailing list in response to an observation by "Romaine" that "I am not able to do simple edits which are done every day [with Flow]."

Erik Möller wrote: "It's [Flow is] a system in early development, and has never been advertised as anything else. To draw conclusions about what it can and cannot do is, by definition, premature."

This patent falsehood got my backhair up and my reply to the list follows:

Tim Davenport wrote: This statement is simply not true.

See the WMF's 2014-15 annual plan:
https://archive.org/details/WikimediaFo ... AnnualPlan

Page 20 (DIRECT QUOTE FOLLOWS):

FLOW

* Current state (June 2014): Flow is an experimental but already feature rich alternative to talk pages which can be enabled by WMF on a per-page basis and is currently used in production on a small number of 'real world' pages, including a couple of WikiProjects and feedback pages for new features.

Key Milestones

* We will aim to cover one major set of new deployments per quarter, carefully picking use cases. Example use cases may include: additional WikiProjects, shared conversation spaces like Teahouse and Village Pump, entire wikis willing to switch to Flow, etc. Success will be reflected in adoption/participation metrics, targeting improved participation dynamics relative to talk pages.
* By the end of the fiscal year [i.e. June 30, 2015 --t.d.], we expect to cover one major use case thoroughly (e.g. all user talk pages, all Village Pump type pages, etc.)
* By the end of the fiscal year [i.e. June 30, 2015. --t.d.], the team will be a multi-device team, ready to maintain and develop the user experience for phones, tablets, and desktops.

(END QUOTE)

It is shocking to see an assertion from WMF's VP of Engineering and Product Development that Flow has been consistently portrayed by WMF as nothing more than "a system in early development." In actual fact, it has been portrayed as more or less finished software heading for a rollout in the near future, as the above clearly illustrates.

Kiefer.Wolfowitz · Unread post by **Kiefer.Wolfowitz** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 9:09 am

Tim, would you work with Hex on a blog post, focusing on Herr Erik Möller?

Is there any evidence that WMF Executive Director (ED) Lila Tretikov hold any authority over Erik Moeller, vicious director of bad software?
Or is she supposed to be only the public face of the WikiMedia Foundation (WMF)?

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 1:30 pm

SB_Johnny wrote:This reminds me of the rather hostile opinion some of the Wikiversity people held for Möller around that time, because he was plugging WE rather than WV, which were founded at about the same time. In fact, one of the big complaints was that WE was getting all sorts of great gadgets like Liquid Threads, while WV was getting very little support (software, moral, or otherwise) from the WMF, and in particular from Herr Möller.

Presumably, Möller agreed with the prevailing view that if Wikiversity had you they didn't need any more help.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 2:36 pm

Kiefer.Wolfowitz wrote:Tim, would you work with Hex on a blog post, focusing on Herr Erik Möller?

Is there any evidence that WMF Executive Director (ED) Lila Tretikov hold any authority over Erik Moeller, vicious director of bad software?
Or is she supposed to be only the public face of the WikiMedia Foundation (WMF)?

On the first, I haven't followed his career closely enough to profess expertise. I do know that he's a big part of the problem.

As to points 2 and 3, in theory the ED is Erik's boss. In practice, it is almost like she is a "special consultant on software" and Erik is the de facto supremo. We're all trying to figure out the dynamic between them, I think.

tim

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 1:08 am

Hex wrote:This, and the rest of the 1,500-word article I took it from, are intended for the blog.

Please continue, we'd like to see it. Thanks.

The Garbage Scow · Unread post by **The Garbage Scow** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 2:08 am

You know, it's a shame that Citizendium is basically dead/abandoned (not to mention hideous). With all of these prolific writers so angry, this would be the perfect time for Sanger to steal them away from Wales.

The WMF approach to development reminds me a lot of the marketing-driven designs of the American car companies from the 1970s through much of the 2000s. The focus is on making aesthetic redesigns without actually improving any of the underlying technology or efficiency. Moeller is the worst kind of example of the tail wagging the dog. A director of software development not only designing software that nobody needs or wants, but software that actually makes the site HARDER to use, and justifying it with some responses to silly marketing questionnaires.

Actually, it reminds me of Myspace as much as General Motors. They are really buggering things up by continuing down this path.

VE was a nice idea that was hopelessly broken. The MV... utterly unnecessary. Design changes made so they could say "we changed something". I see zero use for something like Flow.

mac · Unread post by **mac** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 3:19 am

Quiddity (WMF) wrote::Yes, the plan is to spend more time updating documentation this week, beyond the changes from early August. That includes scaling back (or pushing till later) the quarterly goals, partially because of some upcoming developer team changes. Also, we'll be spending some time updating the subpages at mediawiki. [[User:Quiddity (WMF)|Quiddity (WMF)]] ([[User talk:Quiddity (WMF)|talk]]) 23:58, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Changes? Does anyone know what changes Quiddity (WMF) is referring to?

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 4:04 am

mac wrote:
Quiddity (WMF) wrote::Yes, the plan is to spend more time updating documentation this week, beyond the changes from early August. That includes scaling back (or pushing till later) the quarterly goals, partially because of some upcoming developer team changes. Also, we'll be spending some time updating the subpages at mediawiki. [[User:Quiddity (WMF)|Quiddity (WMF)]] ([[User talk:Quiddity (WMF)|talk]]) 23:58, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
Changes? Does anyone know what changes Quiddity (WMF) is referring to?

No - but reading the rest of that diff, with the backtracking and "corrections", I'm again thinking that the instruction has been given to "back off" on deployment of something so obviously unfit, and repair damage/mend bridges. We also have Erik's sudden move to "oh, it's just early days, nothing is set in stone" and his rush of engagement mentioned above.
I'm left looking at Lila, who has, by now settled in, and may be exerting herself. This would be a surprise to me - it wasn't the first impression Lila gave, but perhaps that was wrong. I admit this is conjecture, and even if she has "put her foot down" we still don't know how it would play out in the end - but there does seem to be a change in dynamic. Of course, I could be utterly wrong - and there may be even elements of Jimmy trying to exert pressure: "I said Lila would be the saviour and fix all this". Interesting times.

Kelly Martin · Unread post by **Kelly Martin** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 4:12 am

Randy from Boise wrote:Erik is the de facto supremo

This has been true since Erik beat down Danny in 2006. Jimmy's absence from day to day operations (starting in about 2004-2005) created a power vacuum that Erik has been more than happy to occupy. Danny fought him over it, and lost. (Brad Patrick, as acting CEO, never got beyond dealing with day to day crises.) Florence put up something of a fight, but she didn't have the stomach to go the distance, and all the subsequent board chairs have basically let Erik do as he pleases.

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 4:32 am

Kelly Martin wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:Erik is the de facto supremo
This has been true since Erik beat down Danny in 2006. Jimmy's absence from day to day operations (starting in about 2004-2005) created a power vacuum that Erik has been more than happy to occupy. Danny fought him over it, and lost. (Brad Patrick, as acting CEO, never got beyond dealing with day to day crises.) Florence put up something of a fight, but she didn't have the stomach to go the distance, and all the subsequent board chairs have basically let Erik do as he pleases.

And maybe the dynamic is that Erik now begins to see the number of people around him, and elsewhere, pointing out he has no clothes on. Rather than any direct "orders" from anyone, this could be self preservation before the writing goes on the wall, having seen the signs. Certainly interesting, though, to see where it goes, if anywhere.

mac · Unread post by **mac** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 5:46 am

Jorm (T-C-L) (Jorm (WMF) (T-C-L)) has added an additional position to his LinkedIn:

Brandon Harris' LinkedIn wrote:Instructor
General Assembly
Educational Institution; 51-200 employees; Education Management industry
August 2014 – Present (2 months) San Francisco Bay Area

I am currently working as an instructor teaching User Experience Design.

General Assembly (school) (T-H-L)

Just a guess, but perhaps Harris sees the writing on the wall and wants to bail before the WMF implodes.

(edited)

Notvelty · Unread post by **Notvelty** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 6:01 am

mac wrote:
Brandon Harris' LinkedIn wrote:Instructor
General Assembly
Educational Institution; 51-200 employees; Education Management industry
August 2014 – Present (2 months) San Francisco Bay Area

I am currently working as an instructor teaching User Experience Design.
General Assembly (school) (T-H-L)

What? For industrial espionage purposes?

mac · Unread post by **mac** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 6:17 am

Digging around a little more, it looks like Lila Tretikov's LinkedIn does not even mention the Wikimedia Foundation. This may have been mentioned here before, but damned if I can find it.

Lila Tretikov's Experience

Board Advisor
Zamurai Corporation
2014 – Present (less than a year) San Francisco Bay Area

Chief Product Officer
SugarCRM
2012 – Present (2 years)

It then goes into "Lila Tretikov's Honors and Awards", without any mention of the Wikimedia Foundation.

TungstenCarbide · Unread post by **TungstenCarbide** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 6:08 pm

Kelly Martin wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:Erik is the de facto supremo
This has been true since Erik beat down Danny in 2006. Jimmy's absence from day to day operations (starting in about 2004-2005) created a power vacuum that Erik has been more than happy to occupy. Danny fought him over it, and lost. (Brad Patrick, as acting CEO, never got beyond dealing with day to day crises.) Florence put up something of a fight, but she didn't have the stomach to go the distance, and all the subsequent board chairs have basically let Erik do as he pleases.

Remember Anthere's famous mailing list post about Danny; 'hmmm, you seem to have a problem with authority', not to mention her lawsuit threat? Anthere could be real nasty and was outspoken with her opinion that the WMF needed more non-Americans.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 6:46 pm

TungstenCarbide wrote:Remember Anthere's famous mailing list post about Danny; 'hmmm, you seem to have a problem with authority', not to mention her lawsuit threat? Anthere could be real nasty and was outspoken with her opinion that the WMF needed more non-Americans.

Excellent point. People on this forum seem to forget how the WMF was before Sue was hired in 2008. For example:

1. Making Daniel "Mav" Mayer the "treasurer", despite his total lack of experience with handling a nonprofit's finances. He repeatedly complained about having to do it, yet the people listed below kept begging him to stay.

2. Anthere, what a buffoon.

3. And why did they make Brad Patrick the "counsel", exactly?

4. Moeller, right from the beginning.

5. It appears that people have already forgotten Angela Beesley. I consider her to be worse than Moeller.

6. Would you hire someone like Cary Bass to help run your nonprofit?

7. Danny Wool wasn't the best choice, but he was at least more honest than the people listed above.

8. Remember Alex Roshuk? He helped set up the WMF, and then left in disgust at how the above persons were "running the show".

And as always, the ultimate PITA, Wales, hovering over all of this like a giant tsetse fly, infecting everyone with his pathological dishonesty.

Hex · Unread post by **Hex** » Mon Sep 08, 2014 7:41 pm

EricBarbour wrote:
Hex wrote:This, and the rest of the 1,500-word article I took it from, are intended for the blog.
Please continue, we'd like to see it. Thanks.

Happy to, if someone can drop me a line about the blogging process here.

The Garbage Scow · Unread post by **The Garbage Scow** » Thu Sep 11, 2014 1:34 pm

Not sure if anyone noticed the latest Flow-related drahmaz. Some joker using an IP transcluded the entire AN/I into a wikiproject talk page being used for Flow testing and succeeded in pinging... I don't even know how many people at Wikipedia. Tons. The IP even showed up to brag about doing it for the LULZ at the subsequent AN/I discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... is_this.3F

Of course, Moeller was quick to jump in and insist that the issue was with Echo rather than Flow. Fram's response had me chuckling. And apparently everyone hates Flow (and Moeller) so much that there was no talk whatsoever of blocking the IP LULZ prankster (any other IP on any other page would have been blocked for "disruption").

And the AN/I discussion brings up an interesting issue: not leaving edit summaries is often considered disruptive, yet flow does not allow edit summaries.

This is really starting to get good!

AL1 · Unread post by **AL1** » Thu Sep 11, 2014 3:28 pm

I need only to look at his userboxes to know that we probably wouldn't get on (sample: This user is a modern imperialist and believes in the re-establishment of the British Empire) but The Bushranger (T-C-L) puts things pretty succinctly:

So, let's see here: No edit summaries were used, as those don't exist in Flow - So, not using edit summaries is considered disruptive, but now they want to make all discussion pages so that you can't use them? Flow pages can not be deleted, and protection only works after a fashion (or sometimes not at all) - So we won't be able to delete talk pages when we need to move them in order to move pages? This is a good idea why?...

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Thu Sep 11, 2014 10:40 pm

BTW:

Hired in May 2014: Danny Horn, founder of the Muppets Wiki and ex-employee of Wikia. His job: product manager for Flow. A great asset to the WMF!

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Thu Sep 11, 2014 11:56 pm

I'm gonna let you continue, but I just want to say that mocking people for their appearance is not in line with our usual practice.

So I sliced two posts.

Konveyor Belt · Unread post by **Konveyor Belt** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 12:24 am

EricBarbour wrote:BTW:

Hired in May 2014: Danny Horn, founder of the Muppets Wiki and ex-employee of Wikia. His job: product manager for Flow. A great asset to the WMF!

If he is the founder of the Muppets Wiki, he should know the habits and needs of both little children and basement dwellers, two demographics that are troll heavy. Perhaps this is why Flow cannot hide vandalism like that IP that transcluded ANI.

The Garbage Scow · Unread post by **The Garbage Scow** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 5:04 pm

Konveyor Belt wrote:
EricBarbour wrote:BTW:

Hired in May 2014: Danny Horn, founder of the Muppets Wiki and ex-employee of Wikia. His job: product manager for Flow. A great asset to the WMF!
If he is the founder of the Muppets Wiki, he should know the habits and needs of both little children and basement dwellers, two demographics that are troll heavy. Perhaps this is why Flow cannot hide vandalism like that IP that transcluded ANI.

It's as logical as allowing IPs and brand new accounts to page move the live daily featured article. How many years has it been now since Willy on Wheels style vandalism was stopped by building in safeguards?

I'm sure a few "old friends" are patiently waiting for their chance to wreak havoc.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 7:54 pm

The Garbage Scow wrote:How many years has it been now since Willy on Wheels style vandalism was stopped by building in safeguards?

Guess you didn't get the memo: it didn't stop him, it merely slowed him down a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... ls/Archive

Ming · Unread post by **Ming** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 9:18 pm

The Garbage Scow wrote:Not sure if anyone noticed the latest Flow-related drahmaz. Some joker using an IP transcluded the entire AN/I into a wikiproject talk page being used for Flow testing and succeeded in pinging... I don't even know how many people at Wikipedia. Tons. The IP even showed up to brag about doing it for the LULZ at the subsequent AN/I discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... is_this.3F

Of course, Moeller was quick to jump in and insist that the issue was with Echo rather than Flow. Fram's response had me chuckling. And apparently everyone hates Flow (and Moeller) so much that there was no talk whatsoever of blocking the IP LULZ prankster (any other IP on any other page would have been blocked for "disruption").

Ming was on the receiving end of this stunt. His initial reaction was

but he's coming around to

:obliterate:

Kumioko · Unread post by **Kumioko** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 11:26 pm

I also have to give Fram props for his tenacity in rebelling against Flow and VE. I generally think that the project can do better without his manipulation and underhanded tricks but I agree with him in this instance. Flow is just the latest WMF stunt to try and build up their resumes. I have non problem with them building the functionality for the Wikimedia software for those who want it. But there is no rush to jam it down the Wikipedia communities throats. If they can afford to pay a dozen developers and employees countless hours to build and champion this turd, they can easily shell out $1000 for Disbenser to keep reflinks going.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Wed Sep 17, 2014 6:43 pm

This is the most gruesome part of the pathology

To be honest after my eighteen years in software development
I have never worked with someone who spends more time defending
a position (and thinking they are right) than they do listening to the
genuine frustrations and requests from a user community.
- Peter Rawsthorne, WikiEducator thread, 25 September 2008

I have to completely agree with Peter here.

Erik Mo:eller lacks the ability to listen to the people who will have to use his software.
It's not that he doesn't care, he just can't fathom that anyone could disagree with him.
All dissent is viewed as personal attacks on him and his team and thus not worthy of consideration.

It makes him patently incompetent as a director of engineering.
It is anathema to the ethos of engineering and science in general.

Since it's been a serious, notable problem since at least 2008, you'd have to wonder if this weren't some sort of pathological deficiency with Mo:eller.

The purple unicorn can't get rid of him too soon.
He will never be able to be a part of a functioning engineering department.

Never.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Wed Sep 17, 2014 6:45 pm

Wow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... principles

Have my babies, Fram.

The damning truth

I totally understand what you're saying, and I wish that I had time to fully engage with this discussion. Unfortunately, right now I've got limited time for large-scale philosophical discussions. We're a very small team, working on a very large and complicated project. Quiddity and I are fielding feedback at multiple wikis and mailing lists, as well as triaging bugs, testing code-updates and getting some more features designed, built and out the door. We're reading everything, but we can't scale to reply to every comment.
A lot of the philosophy and architecture for Flow was hashed out with Jorm and others over the last couple years. My job at the moment is to take the current philosophy and architecture, and turn it into a working feature. I think the way that I can be most helpful to this project right now is to actually do more work on the feature, so that we have more to talk about. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:33, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Fuck you people who don't want it.
Fuck you people who think it is architecturally incapable of supporting needed functions.
Fuck you everyone who isn't Erik Mo:eller.

Such arrogance.

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Fri Sep 19, 2014 6:58 am

How many years? How many paid hours? How many dollars?

Let's ignore, for a moment, the fact that even if this worked as "designed" it lacks many of the essential capabilities of a talk page, because nobody actually assessed what they were, and made them a part of the minimum spec. Let's ignore the massive loss of collaborative functionality this bag of crap would therefore cause, even if it was a basically working bag of crap, and glance at some basic aspects of what the fritterers of these many hours and dollars have decided is ready to test:

Please test before and after deploying
As you can see at the interestingly named Topic:S1q7oxlwwt9r7rh0, some of us are now unable to use "return" in their replies, as that triggers the "post" button, effectively restricting them to single-paragraph comments. Furthermore, they can't see them effectively, as they only get one line in the input box.
However, they shouldn't complain, they are the lucky ones. I can't even respond any more. When I use "reply", I get a single-line (infinite scrolling!) box, but no buttons whatsoever" (cancel, preview, post), and if I hit return, I get the "are you sure you want to leave this page?" message. I'm working with Vector, FF32, W7, so pretty standard stuff.
Can you please make sure that the very, very basic functionality (posting things is the bare minimum for a talk page, no?) is tested before and after any rollout? At least now no one can claim that Flow is in any way better than wikitalk, unless you simply want to abandon all talk :-)
Note: this seems to happen only when you are in topic view (also with other topics like [50], not when you are in full page view. But as far as I can follow the devs' philosophy, topic view is supposed to be the default... Fram (talk) 06:35, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

They repeatedly present software that just, basically, does not work, and cannot be used, even now, even knowing what the community reaction must be. It's mind boggling.

From higher up the page, here's the "Product Manager" dissembling, not feeling sorry for himself, and asking folks not to be mean to him:

I updated the documentation page with a more realistic version of a roadmap that gives a more accurate expression of how building a project like this works. I know that people on this page (and in discussions elsewhere) want more honesty from me as a PM. That's actually how I want to live, being more natural and real about the work that we're doing. I've gotten more distant and "professional" over the last couple weeks, because that's what happens when people are angry at you, like, all the time about everything.
I'm sick of the way these conversations have been going lately; I'm sure everyone here is. It's boring and awful, and we don't get anywhere. So I'm doing a bit of a reboot in my communication style, and I'll see how it works.
So, the roadmap. Like I said, this version is more realistic, and actually reflects the current state of play. I've been a product manager working on ambitious user-facing features on a MediaWiki platform for about five years, and I've built big crazy features like this. The roadmap is more of a discovery process than a strict plan. I can talk intelligently about what we're working on for the next couple months. Beyond that, I know the general direction that we want to go, but the actual details get fuzzier the further out you go. This isn't a trick. This is actually how it works.
I want to talk more with the people who are posting on this page, for several reasons. For one thing, it's just fun, and it's a part of my job that I really like. Also -- you guys have good questions and ideas, and you challenge me, and that's productive and cool and it makes everything better. But I can't do that if I'm just going to get yelled at, and if everything I say is picked apart. It just doesn't work. I'm not feeling sorry for myself here, or expecting anybody else to feel sorry for me. This is my job; I choose to do it, and this is part of the job. I'm just saying that I can be as honest and real and receptive as the conversation allows for. I'm going to hit save right now, before I talk myself out of it. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

"sick of the way these conversations have been going lately"? You mean you don't like:

Here's some stuff.
But it's absolute crap, and we don't want it.
Oh, ok, here's some broken changes to the crap.
They make it worse. We don't want it. It breaks things. Turn it off, please.
We've now made the "save" button blue - does that help?
Stop it. Please.

type of conversations? There's a solution to that, "Product Manager" (that's a clue, right there).

Thracia · Unread post by **Thracia** » Fri Sep 19, 2014 8:13 am

Jim wrote:From higher up the page, here's the "Product Manager" dissembling, not feeling sorry for himself, and asking folks not to be mean to him:

<snip>I'm sick of the way these conversations have been going lately; I'm sure everyone here is. It's boring and awful, and we don't get anywhere.

<snip> I want to talk more with the people who are posting on this page, for several reasons. For one thing, it's just fun, and it's a part of my job that I really like.

Also -- you guys have good questions and ideas, and you challenge me, and that's productive and cool and it makes everything better. But I can't do that if I'm just going to get yelled at, and if everything I say is picked apart. It just doesn't work.

There they go again, with that Jorm/OKeyes/WMF "you want to motivate me, make sure I've got work that doesn't bore me" schtick.

Being Product Manager on a product that's flat on its arse, everyone is going to yell at you and pick apart everything you say until it's fixed.

If that "just doesn't work" (or, heaven forbid, is too "boring" for delicate flowers), then you resign!

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Fri Sep 19, 2014 4:26 pm

Thracia wrote:
Jim wrote:From higher up the page, here's the "Product Manager" dissembling, not feeling sorry for himself, and asking folks not to be mean to him:

<snip>I'm sick of the way these conversations have been going lately; I'm sure everyone here is. It's boring and awful, and we don't get anywhere.

<snip> I want to talk more with the people who are posting on this page, for several reasons. For one thing, it's just fun, and it's a part of my job that I really like.

Also -- you guys have good questions and ideas, and you challenge me, and that's productive and cool and it makes everything better. But I can't do that if I'm just going to get yelled at, and if everything I say is picked apart. It just doesn't work.
There they go again, with that Jorm/OKeyes/WMF "you want to motivate me, make sure I've got work that doesn't bore me" schtick.

Being Product Manager on a product that's flat on its arse, everyone is going to yell at you and pick apart everything you say until it's fixed.

If that "just doesn't work" (or, heaven forbid, is too "boring" for delicate flowers), then you resign!

But not at wikimedia!
Since nobody is a professional at what they've been assigned to do, you eventually have the community liaison director go yell at the customer for not understanding how hard everyone is working.

These poor fuckers are in for such a bad, bad time if they ever have to work outside the WMF.
Wikimedia engineering - the island of lost boys.

I've got 30 years in engineering at all levels; I reiterate, "There is nobody at the WMF who I would ever hire."

Mason · Unread post by **Mason** » Fri Jan 23, 2015 4:21 am

So someone decided to move an article to Flow space, and, well, there were issues.

Further reading.

Hex · Unread post by **Hex** » Fri Jan 23, 2015 3:17 pm

it's not critically important because no-one can move Main page ⇒ Topic:Main page. (Please, don't try...) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 00:21, 23 January 2015

Lukeno94 · Unread post by **Lukeno94** » Fri Jan 23, 2015 4:16 pm

Yeah, that's a pretty dumb thing to say. All it would take is someone with a large sockfarm and a rapid script, and they could essentially wipe out the entire encyclopedia due to that bug.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Fri Jan 23, 2015 4:17 pm

Lukeno94 wrote:Yeah, that's a pretty dumb thing to say. All it would take is someone with a large sockfarm and a rapid script, and they could essentially wipe out the entire encyclopedia due to that bug.

Shhhhh...
I almost have my botnet deployed.

SB_Johnny · Unread post by **SB_Johnny** » Fri Jan 23, 2015 11:43 pm

Vigilant wrote:
Lukeno94 wrote:Yeah, that's a pretty dumb thing to say. All it would take is someone with a large sockfarm and a rapid script, and they could essentially wipe out the entire encyclopedia due to that bug.
Shhhhh...
I almost have my botnet deployed.

Please tell me you're serious.

Shutting down WP for even a few hours because of a publicly known exploit introduced because of Möller's obsession and obstinancy brought it live would be truly delicious.