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The Bizarre and Complex Story of a Failed Wikipedia Software Extension
metasonix writes Originally developed by Wikia coders, "Liquid Threads" was intended to be a better comment system for use on MediaWiki talkpages. When applied to Wikipedia, then each Wikipedia talkpage or noticeboard would become something resembling a more modernized bulletin board, hopefully easier to use. Unfortunately, the project was renamed "Flow" and taken over by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers. And as documented in this very long Wikipediocracy post, the result was "less than optimal." After seven years and millions of dollars spent, even WMF Director Lila Tretikov admits "As such it is not ready for 'prime time' for us."
>...taken over by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers. ... After seven years and millions of dollars spent, ... "As such it is not ready for 'prime time' for us."
I assume the Wikimedia developers kept reverting each other's checkins for various reasons such as "Commenting needed", "Not codeworthy", and so forth. </tongue-in-cheek>
So "Large Company Can't Develop Software" is news now? It's not like WMF is really a tech company, it just happens to have a large complex and popular website.
"The Bizarre and Complex Story of a Failed Wikipedia Software Extension" -- so they took this failed Alpha code, installed and upgraded it here, and called it Beta?
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
WikiPoliticians make terrible project managers, apparently. Who knew?
Wikipedia is now infested with social justice warriors and organized causes censoring and controlling vast swaths of content to make sure it maintains their particular view on the world. What is the fucking point, anymore?
I nominate this topic for speedy deletion. WP:Notability
(It's only notable if I say it is)
It was only the Wikimedia Foundation's inability to get along with its own user base that saved it from implementing completely failed code and possibly wrecking their own encyclopedia. http://wikipediocracy.com/foru...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
The article summary speaks of "millions of dollars spent" on a new discussion system for Wikipedia. The article actually tells a very different story -- the LiquidThreads extension started out as a Google Summer of Code project, was funded for a while by an interested third party, and then received a little attention from the Wikimedia Foundation (one designer, one developer) before development was put into maintenance mode. I would ballpark the total money spent around $100-$150K max. Elapsed time does not equate money spent. LQT continues to be in use on a number of projects, but its architecture and UX needed to be fundamentally overhauled.
Flow, the designated successor to LQT, continues to be in development by a small team, and is gradually being deployed to appropriate use cases. It is now running on designated pages in a couple of Wikipedia languages, and old LiquidThreads pages are being converted over using a conversion script developed by the Flow team. Contrary to the article's claim, WikiEducator upgraded to a recent version of LQT, and will be able to migrate to Flow in future using the conversion script.
You can give Flow a try in the sandbox on mediawiki.org and see for yourself whether the article's claims are hyperbole or not. Disclaimer: I am the person referenced in the headline of the Wikipediocracy article, so take my view with a grain of salt, as well. ;-)
The Wiki has been fighting being overwhelmed by crap.
open does not mean open to every stupid asshole who want's to abuse the system
this is another attempt to hijack a legitimate source by assholes
Wikipedia editors are highly territorial, infighting, nitpicking, hairtrigger frothing mad. You can't solve that with an extension, as much as you'd like to think that everything is app-able. Software just makes people even more polarized.
> You can give Flow a try in the sandbox on mediawiki.org [...]
Thanks for the link. I actually tried it out, and well.. it works for me. Really.
And I know I'm a demanding customer -- one of those dinosaurs who refuses to let his browser execute random Javascript from "out there" and thinks it necessary to make a statement by keeping cookies disabled.
So I have no idea on how the interface looks or feels with all bells and whistles on (nor I have any wish to find out), but as it is, for me it's a resounding success.
Thanks and keep it that way!
I recall a while back here on slashdot there was a trial (that lasted a day or two) of a commenting system for writing comments - rather than replies - about user comments. It was here for a short while, and then disappeared.
That said, as the slashdot philosophy is generally "release code, talk about developing it, and then leave it in place and forget about it", I would have expected that by default wikipedia or WMF would have done better.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
WMF was producing kitchenwares ...
The extension was not intended to solve all problems with editor's behavior, but provide a better discusison system than the current manual edition of the page source. Unfortunately, the current extension does not cover the needs. Manual edition of the page source is actually very useful to maintain the discussions, and people don't want to go back in features.
WMF does not listen to its userbase or editorship, according to the article. This seems clear that Moeller is dictatorial instead of collaborative
The Harris vision of Flow was insane, and why software projects fail. And FLOW never addressed all the ways in which Wikipedia's talk pages are used.
If the WikiEducator experience is looked at, the staff is clearly bonkers, as rebel talk pages are clearly a sign that management is stupid, since they could exist as regular talk pages, if only management had a brain. The point of talk pages is to let users talk. If they make rebel talk pages, obviously they aren't doing their job since LQT is broken. User rebellion is a clear sign management needs to be fired, since the site is made by the users collaboratively.
I really wondered while reading the wild stories behind the talk system why a "good enough" solution wasn't first created quickly and deployed.
IMO the 20% effort (or much less) that would fix the 80% (or much more) of UI issues would be simply automating the mediawiki markup editing on talk pages! Just add “add new topic” button to the page, “reply” link after each ~~~~ that’ll show up a textarea for your comment and upon submission simply edit the wiki source automatically, adding your comment. New users don’t have to learn all the syntax rules and discussion can proceed quickly and with much smaller amount of editing races. Power users can still just edit the page when it’s needed in the very long tail of uncommon cases.
This could all take days to develop, weeks to push through live beta to full deployment. What am I missing? I guess part of it is that TFA never properly defined what problems are being solved here, so maybe my assumptions about that (UX while adding comments) are wrong.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
Right. Self-righteous douchebags are self-righteous douchebags either way.
Slashdot forums are now infested with social justice warriors and organized causes censoring and controlling vast swaths of content to make sure it maintains their particular view on the world.
I come here for the love
There are plenty of software projects that either end in outright failure or have less than optimal success. Look at what a colossal failure Slashdot Beta was.
I wouldn't take much notice of anything posted on WIkipediocracy, and especially not if it concerns issues involving software development.
For a site supposedly dedicated to monitoring/analyzing/criticizing Wikipedia/WMF, this blog post followed the rather disappointing trend of them writing about the Wikipedia/WMFs software process in a way that doesn't even mention at all the very specific and unique traits/features/issues of that specific organisation/community which make their projects bad/controversial/delayed. As you may (or may not) know, these are quite different to the ones usually encountered in both commercial and open source projects.
I have extensive experience of these issues, and if Wikipediocracy didn't react to criticism in the exact same way they allege Wikipedia does (by deleting it and expelling the outsider), then it might be able to a better job of writing about this stuff than this.
As it is, Wikipediocracy has an awful record regarding software utilisation - they installed forum software specifically designed to facilitate an extremely high posting rate, with multiple threads a day. Yet the way they choose to moderate the forum completely negates this - they're actually extremely happy about the fact their forum is so quiet you can read an entire months worth of posting in an hour. Which is bizarre to say the least. Needless to say, in that environment, complex issues like the flow debacle, which can go quiet for months and explode in furious controversy over a few hours, go pretty much unexamined.
And when you examine the Wikipediocracy forum/blog archive from the perspective of someone who knows an awful lot about the flaws/failings/foibles of Wikipedia/WMF, it's actually quite surprising to learn where they have massive gaps in coverage. They seem to ignore some topics simply because it apparently bores them to talk about it (because they've all heard it before). Other topics are undocumented because of their aforementioned exclusionary approach, and the fact that their definition of trolling is not the normally understood one, it's the one actually used by Wikipedia so frequently (namely that a troll is someone saying something you disagree with). Which is again, completely bizarre. Or not so surprising, once you realise what the true motivation is of the people behind the site.
If there's anyone here who is interested in writing about the specific and unique things that Wikipedia/WMF have done which have meant their various software products/projects have been poor/slow/controversial in ways that are likely to be picked up by the wider world (as opposed to just being chewed over by people who know it all already), my best advice is to stay well clear of Wikipediocracy.
... is that it breaks Wikipedia's internal mechanisms by totally and utterly destroying all sense of location in a discussion. In a Wikipedia discussion, each comment has a certain environment that may change, but usually not too drastically. Different discussion pages tend to have different visual flair: Large blocks of texts or lots of short comments, most comments indented on the same level or it keeps changing. 'Hatted' threads and sub-threads (i.e. you have to click to see them). Also, users can freely edit other users' comments.
There are advantages and disadvantages to the traditional wiki discussion style. Advantages include that you can usually see at a glance in which environment a certain comment that put a user into trouble was made, and if you want to be absolutely sure you can go back in the page history. And, very importantly, if you revisit a discussion after months, the visual appearance gives you clues that make it easier to remember what it was about and how it went and maybe even what you were going to say when you got distracted.
The very point of Liquid Threads is to move things around in such a way as to destroy all of that. Places such as Reddit and Stack Exchange have shown that this can work very well. But once you have a big audience and community norms built on a radically different system, I think it's problematic to make that kind of change. When I was still active on Wikipedia, Liquid Threads was already running on some meta-site. I felt that it was absolutely horrible to use because the re-ordering got in the way of exactly the kind of thoughtful discussion which that particular wiki was supposed to be for.
--- In case anyone wonders: After about 26,000 edits, I left Wikipedia in disgust for a year when it became clear that a vast majority of editors supported retaliating against Islamic extremism by angering ordinary, peaceful Muslims on the Muhammad article for no encyclopedic reason. (I would understand one or two Islamic Muhammad depictions to illustrate the fact that they exist - e.g. there is precisely one on the Turkish version of the article -, but half a dozen is way over the top, gives a very misleading - hence 'unencyclopedic' - impression, and seems designed exclusively to alienate Muslim readers and editors. This feeds the inferiority complex that causes some Muslims to become fundamentalists. By the way, I am an atheist and personally consider the Muhammad image ban stupid.)
When I returned I found that for whatever reason my ability to get *anything* done in controversial areas was gone completely. Apparently, using words such as "genital mutilation" in a discussion, applied to a gender for which the media of a large Western nation practising it on a large scale generally doesn't use it, is much worse than actually encouraging it in an article by abusing rules and then simply shutting down all discussion. And so I joined the ranks of ex-editors who complain about abuse by Wikipedia's almost completely uncontrolled admin caste.
Maybe Liquid Threads would even be capable of solving such problems, once it works properly and the community has adapted to it. Its introduction would no doubt cause a severe crisis, which, come to think of it, is probably just what the English Wikipedia needs.
During that entire timeframe, I would estimate money spent on the project so far at less than $1M. Even if you combine both efforts, "millions of dollars spent" is pure hyperbole, and adding up elapsed time to exaggerate scale and scope of these efforts is equally misleading.
If you don't think $1 MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS spent with fuck all to show for it is a waste of money, then you're a God damned imbecile. But then again you presumably work for Wikimedia, so I'm only restating the obvious.
And you fucking pricks actually have the audacity to beg the public to give you money. lol