User talk:Okeyes (WMF)/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

→

Archive 8

Hand-Coding

Any news on the hand-coding t-shirts, Okeyes? --Tomtomn00 (talk • contributions) 15:27, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Just got an email about it 30 seconds ago :). I'll have details in a few days. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:30, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Any more info? Few days have elapsed. . --Thine Antique Pen (talk • contributions) 10:33, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Budgetary approval: found. Next step, kicking the merchandise manager with my new boots. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:34, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Heh. :) By the way, I renamed myself. (see User:Thine Antique Pen/username) --Thine Antique Pen (talk • contributions) 10:35, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Special:NewPagesFeed

It went red.. So was it moved to somewhere else or deleted? Will it be restored? →TheSpecialUser^Talk_{Contributions}* 05:44, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

As said on WP:NPT, we've had to disable it while a bug is worked out :). Hopefully it'll be live again soon! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:32, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Aand, should now be live! :) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

We have an extensive browser testing regime

«We have an extensive browser testing regime I can get you details on if you so desire; we don't support all browsers, no, because we find Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 3 aren't widely used. We do support all major browsers, and test through a heck of a lot of different versions and OS permutations.» (you at [1]).

«"This Is A Tool Icon" on the with Beacon Hill article» (at [2])

Good to see extensive browser testing works like a charm...

I know, no testing can filter everything, but you also know that and were an arrogant idiot. - Nabla (talk) 14:42, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Nabla, that bug is (1) not a browser-specific one and (2) no longer appearing, because we disabled the source so we could fix it. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:56, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

So, despite it happening on many (all?) browsers, not only with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 3, you still missed it, and launched into the main site. Nice! Again, I know it happens, but you miss the point. When a user talked to you with good intentions, to help - right or wrong - you scorned me, For a "Community Liaison, Product Development"... you are quite bad at your job are you not? You have excessive confidence in you tools, so much so that you insult users that try to help. You sir, are incompetent and arrogant. - Nabla (talk) 20:13, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

I think you are being overly hostile and rude, Nabla. The bug you are talking about has nothing to do with browser compatibility. It is the result of a bug which no one has been able to duplicate in any test instance under any circumstance. That's not to say that it is not "binary repeatable" but rather that we haven't figured out the specific steps to cause it. I personally think you owe Oliver an apology for your overly aggressive tone.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

You miss the point entirely. Bugs happen, no big deal. I was pointing it out to Okeyes, because months ago he downtalked to me, pointing me that you have extensive testing that apparently would catch any foreseeable problem except for, I quote: "Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 3". I immediately gave him the chance to take such a silly reply back, which he did not. Had he apologized for his rudeness (we all have bad moments, I sure do) I would have no problem in forgetting about it. Instead he insisted. So, from my point of view, as much as I have contacted with Okeyes, he IS incompetent. Would he have given a simple short answer - "thanks for your opinion, though I do not think we will have much of a problem because we do extensive testing" - and this would be long gone, instead he goes on about Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 3, as if I were some kind of internet-caveman. No, it is Okeyes that owes me an apology. I do too... But he owes one. Is he willing to ask for it? - Nabla (talk) 20:48, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

You asked if Wikipedia was compatible with, and I quote, "all browsers and all versions". I responded that we were not compatible with all browsers in all versions, and used Internet Explorer 3 as an example precisely because it is too outdated to be worth testing for, not to insult you. A chance to take such a silly reply back? You said that "[my] replies are those of an arrogant fool" and that I was replying with contempt.

As for asking for an apology? Nabla, apologies are given, not demanded. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Point taken, my question was not clear. But do you really think anyone is asking for IE3 compatibility? Or is it not more likely that I meant "all (usual) browsers in all (their most recent) versions"?; I first asked you to take back a silly reply about IE3. After you kept your tone, down-talking me, then I thought you were being arrogant and told you so (search the text, will you, please?); agreed, apologies should not be asked for. Will you tell that to Jorm? I think this misunderstanding is mostly due to the inherent difficulty of written communication, plus the incredibly bad mood reigning over WP over the latest years. That is, I admit I was harsh, maybe too harsh, and I am not proud of it. I am sorry for that, and I have retired, and will get back to retirement, because I am fed up with that, and don't want that bad mood to affect me any more. But it is a pity to see that you, most of all in your (WMF related) position, can not see that you are contributing to that bad mood too, I tried to help, if you want to listen, agree or disagree, you do; if you want to pick up the bad written parts of my good intention contributions and reply to those only... it is your choice. - Nabla (talk) 23:25, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh! Are you aware I am Portuguese? (my user page used to say so) That is, my english is not too bad, but I do make mistakes, writing and reading... Above, when I said you should ask for an apologies it was a false friend mistake. In portuguese one would "pedir desculpa" (ask for an excuse) while in english one would "give an apology". Ask/give... thus the confusion. If you are not automatically aware that many (most?) users are not english native, and that you should read things with extra care, well... you should. - Nabla (talk) 23:36, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

PS What happened here is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about back then: by adding more and more feature you eventually may get weird errors. ("The more thingies you add the more likely is that code breaks up on someone's browser"). My "hypothesising" happens to be real. It is a statistical evidence, BTW, has you add stuff the probability of an error going undetected approaches one, no matter how good is your testing - and I believe it is good - meaning I have not even said anything specially relevant, I wrote the obvious truth. So, it was Okeyes' reply, about Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 3, that was entirely out of line. - Nabla (talk) 21:01, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

And if one still needed proof... I happened to come here today... well, I (again) admitted some of my mistakes so, maybe, finally, you would admitted to not being 100% perfect yourself. So, did you? No way! Also I read, bellow that you "have 71 Good Articles, 196 Did You Knows and 20 pieces of featured content." (your quote, my bold, my link). Yes, sir. You are an idiot, an arrogant editor, and a very good example of what is wrong in social interaction within WP. And that gets you a job in WMF?!

Nabla, I'm very sorry I didn't get to your message; when multiple people post to my talkpage, I only get one orange bar, and it's easy to lose new comments in old threads. I am sorry if my comments came off as rude or arrogant; that was never my intention, and I shall put more effort into making my comments understandable by an audience that includes non-native English speakers. At the same time, however - if you know you don't speak and read perfect English, you should interpret comments in a positive light, or ask for clarification if there are bits you are not understanding. I did not mean to be patronising with the browser testing comment, and if you'd simply asked for me to clarify, this wouldn't have happened.

As for the comment above; the user I was replying to implied I didn't know anything about Wikipedia. I brought up my contributions to show that actually, yes, I was very experienced dealing with the site and its protocols. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 05:35, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Okeys, I assumed good faith and asked you to take back a silly reply about IE3. I only escalated because you insisted on talking about IE3. Do you really think I asked for IE3 compatibility? Have YOU assumed good faith? My comment was not even exactly the smartest or strangest one, has I simply pointed the obvious: as code is added the probability of a error getting through approaches one. This thread points that out: eventually some silly error got out. No big deal, the error. The sad thing is that you scorned a user for pointing the obvious. I hope you really will measure your words better on future occasions (though I doubt it) - Nabla (talk) 02:24, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

I repeatedly apologised for my words, Nabla: I'm sorry this wasn't satisfactory. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:41, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

It is a sad thing, and one we have to live on quite often: no apologies can take back the actions that lead to them. That likely includes the bad impression I certainly caused you with my tone... As I said I believe it was a bad day followed by a misunderstanding. But it can't be erased. I wish some things, way more serious than a discussion on the web, could be undone, but they can't. Thank you, anyway. - Nabla (talk) 00:19, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Is there a need for the mass "NPT notification" on user talk pages?

My watchlist is now being flooded by your changes on the user talk pages I'm watching, maybe a site note would be better then flooding en Wiki with messages on user talk pages. Bidgee (talk) 13:33, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

You mean a full site notice? You're suggesting that I notify every single editor and/or reader about something that only 110-ish people have indicated they care about?

I'm very sorry for flooding your watchlist. However, when we have 500 million distinct visitors a year and 138,116 active users. Notifying both or one of those groups about this internal change would cause more disruption, not less. Having said that, the next piece of software we'll be working on is a proper notifications system, which will hopefully solve the problem quite nicely. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:39, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Mine isn't flooded, as I have 10000+ things on it, it gets flooded all the time. --(tomtomn00) Thine Antique Pen (talk • contributions) 13:41, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Site notice is far better since those who don't want to read it will dismiss it and you only edit one page to do it, unlike the talk pages which I can't dismiss and floods the watchlist and database. Sigh at the excuse, not good enough and you should know more about Wikipedia. Bidgee (talk) 13:47, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Bidgee, I've been editing Wikipedia since 2006. I am a sysop, I have 71 Good Articles, 196 Did You Knows and 20 pieces of featured content. I find the assumption that I don't know much about Wikipedia highly offensive. A site notice would tell every single reader about an internal piece of software we never expect them to encounter. They have no reason to see this information, they have no use for this information, and I am not going to bombard them with it to make you feel better. Yes, you have to see a load of things in your watchlist. I appreciate this must be annoying. However, seeing lots of messages intended for other people that you do not care about is kind of a given when you watchlist pages where people leave messages exclusively for other people. It is not an issue solved by insisting I bombard 500 million people who don't care with the notification instead of 110 who do. It is not a problem solved by patronising me, or assuming that just because I work for the Foundation I don't know how things work. It is a problem solved by you un-watching those pages. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:54, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

I've been here since 2005 and don't give a rats on how many DYKs, GA ect I've helped. I watch the pages for a reason, ie vandalism or Auatralian or other related topics, why should I unwatch the pages just because you want to flood Wikipedia. Also it is clear the new "internal piece of software" is causing a database lag which is getting worse! Bidgee (talk) 14:15, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Bidgee, the new software was first introduced last week. This is a reintroduction. If it was causing database lag, it would probably have turned up then.

110 messages is not flooding wikipedia. Sending out a notice to every reader and editor - that would be flooding. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:17, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

"Proably" your really not a 100% though or you would have stated "would've". So these notices are flooding then? Bidgee (talk) 14:25, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

The database replication lag was not caused by Special:NewPagesFeed; it was caused by a rogue process that was attempting to powder the system with API calls. It was unrelated.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

That is not a sitenotice, which is what you originally requested :). And can you explain how 138,000 messages would not be more floody than 110, particularly when we don't want to notify 138,000 people? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

What if some of the 137,890 people never knew about it and are interested in it? Those who don't want it just have to hit dismiss and it is hidden (and hardly floody). Bidgee (talk) 14:30, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

The intention is not to notify "everyone interested" it is to notify "everyone involved in the project". It is a very, very small-scale socialisation - the larger-scale stuff will wait until early June, when we'll have deployed a set of bugfixes. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:33, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't think the conversation above is that good. Sorry. Anyway, I didn't receive the thing on my talk page, could you send one? --Thine Antique Pen (talk • contributions) 14:57, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

TL;DR version is "the new page is at Special:NewPagesFeed". Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:00, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

it's on your tomtomn00 talk page... you should change that if you want to receive the notifications.Wikipelli ^Talk 15:10, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Done. --Thine Antique Pen (talk • contributions) 15:12, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Mail

See email. --Thine Antique Pen (talk • contributions) 23:13, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

The Tea Leaf - Issue Four

Hi! Welcome to the fourth issue of The Tea Leaf, the official newsletter for the Teahouse!

• Teahouse pilot wraps up after 13 weeks After being piloted on English Wikipedia starting in February, the Teahouse wrapped up its pilot period on May 27, 2012. We expect this is just the beginning for the Teahouse and hope the project will continue to grow in the months to come!

Thank you and congratulations to all of the community members who participated - and continue to participate!

• What you've all been waiting for: Teahouse Pilot Report is released! We look forward to your feedback on the methodology and outcomes of this pilot project.
• ....and if a pilot report wasn't enough, the Teahouse Pilot Metrics Report is out too! Dive into the numbers and survey results to learn about the impact the Teahouse has made on English Wikipedia.
• Teahouse shows positive impact on new editor retention and engagement

• 409 new editors participated during the entire pilot period, with about 40 new editors participating in the Teahouse per week.
• Two weeks after participating, 33% of Teahouse guests are still active on Wikipedia, as opposed to 11% of a similar control group.
• New editors who participated in the Teahouse edit 10x the number of articles, make 7x more global edits, and 2x as much of their content survives on Wikipedia compared to the control group.

• Women participate in the Teahouse 28% of Teahouse participants were women, up from 9% of editors on Wikipedia in general, good news for this project which aimed to have impact on the gender gap too - but still lots to be done here!
• New opportunities await for the Teahouse in phase two as the Teahouse team and Wikipedia community examine ways to improve, scale, and sustain the project. Opportunities for future work include:

• Automating or semi-automating systems such as invites, metrics and archiving
• Experimenting with more ways for new editors to discover the Teahouse
• Building out the social and peer-to-peer aspects further, including exploring ways to make answering questions easier, creating more ways for new editors to help each other and for all participants to acknowledge each other's efforts
• Growing volunteer capacity, continuing to transfer Teahouse administration tasks to volunteers whenever possible, and looking for new ways to make maintenance and participation easier for everyone.

• Want to know how you can lend a hand at the Teahouse? Become a host! Learn more about what makes the Teahouse different than other help spaces on Wikipedia and see how you can help new editors by visiting here.
• Say hello to the new guests at the Teahouse. Take the time to welcome and get to know the latest guests at the Teahouse. Drop off some wikilove to these editors today, as being welcomed by experienced editors is really encouraging to new Wikipedians.

You are receiving The Tea Leaf after expressing interest or participating in the Teahouse! To remove yourself from receiving future newsletters, please remove your username here. Sarah (talk) 17:04, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Okeyes (WMF). You have new messages at Wifione's talk page.
Message added 16:56, 15 June 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Wifione ^Message 16:56, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

AFT5 notice on a redirect

Hi Oliver,

You must have used some kind of script or something, because you gave me my AFT5 newsletter thing on a redirect page: diff. I'll fix it, but I just wanted to let you know. :D Jesse V. (talk) 08:28, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

• Headdesks*. I'm going to be over here, removing my foot from my mouth if you need me :P. Thanks for letting me know! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

There's a template for that: Facepalm but in a situation like this, it might be more appropriate to use the more prominent Picard double-facepalm :D In any case, it was really confusing on my RSS reader app, because of course it kept redirecting me. Then when I got back to my computer I checked the diffs and discovered what happened. But since the page contains a redirect, your message doesn't show up at all. Not a problem, I read from someone else's talk page. :P Jesse V. (talk) 17:43, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Heheh. I'll correct it in future :). Any chance we're going to see you at Wikimania, btw? I appreciate it's a bit of a trek :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:01, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Where is WIkimania? Jesse V. (talk) 17:07, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

The great(ish) city of Washington, DC! A bit of a trek, I appreciate ;p. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I Undid Your Edit

You made this edit on a redirect page. I assume you were using a bot? In any case, I undid it but you may want to place it on User talk:Deathlasersonline. Ryan Vesey Review me! 16:43, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Oops *headdesk*. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:43, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

10% of the articles

Hi Oliver, I noticed that you said that the WMF could open the tool to 10% of the articles? I'm assuming that's still random, but I was wondering if there's a chance that I could request that Folding@home be added to the list. The feedback from the tool would help me improve the article further. It wasn't clear to me from your message when full-scale deployment was going to happen. Jesse V. (talk) 17:14, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid not :(. We're actually altering how we apportion articles.

Originally, a category was added to an article and the presence of this category told MediaWiki to enable AFT5. Obviously this is a bit of a problem for ramping it up - imagine having to automatically make 3.9 million identical edits - and so we've switched to a lottery system, which essentially rolls a dice with the pageIDs. This makes it a lot easier to widen deployment - but impossible to add or remove specific articles :(. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:44, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Why are old versions of the AFT tool still active?

Why are versions other than the most current of the AFT still active on Wikipedia? Jason Quinn (talk) 18:16, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Because we haven't finished developing AFT5 yet, and don't want to roll it out to every page until it's pretty much finished :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Coupla questions on AFTv5

I'm really liking all these user-friendly improvements, but clarification:

• When is it appropriate to use the "hide" function? I used it a few times on gibberish then read the info page and realized it's equivalent to revdel and panicked a little. Is it meant to be a curation of the feedback so only the most useful (and/or coherent) remains, or is it meant to be equivalent to deletion - only for egregious stuff?
• Can "oversight requested" feedback be viewed by everyone? Is that, if so, a good idea?

I do realize a formal policy for use of the feature is premature, but some clarifications probably need to be made to the supporting pages for now - happy to critique/contribute to said pages if my meddling is welcome :) sonia (talk) 21:50, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

• In order; yeah, it's meant to be revdel-esque. To be honest, I've been getting increasingly leery about this; the initial rationale was that not making it equivalent to something already within policy meant leaving it to go unenforced until the community could come up with guidelines, and revdel is the nearest equivalent. However, we really do need a general-purpose tool for killin' things; if the community wants to find a way to incorporate it into something else I would be most grateful, and I really doubt we'd take issue with it :). Oversight requested can be viewed by "monitors", not everyone (thankfully!). For reasons beyond my comprehension, it was exceedingly difficult to change that. Blegh. And sure, shoot me any suggestions you have! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:44, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Tomtomn00

As you can see above, Tomtomn00 has changed his name. Please change the address list that generated this edit. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 09:28, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Headdesk; yeah, will do. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:13, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Blame me entirely for that, I forgot to change it. ⇒TAP 16:59, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Wikipedia Page Not Showing Up in Google or Bing Search

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Wikipedia Page Not Showing Up in Google or Bing Search. – Allen4names (IPv6 contributions) 04:09, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Major problem with NOINDEX proposal

I created Barry Stuppler in my userspace. Articles that get created in the userspace and are later moved to the article space don't get patrolled. That is because the software doesn't list them at Special:NewPages. In general, the better an article that I create is, the more likely it is to be created in my userspace. For example Ole J. Finstad isn't indexed, while Charles W. Gillam is. I think this issue is major enough that the process should be rolled back until a solution can be created. Barry Stuppler should be a did you know in a couple of days, it would be ridiculous for the article to be noindexed. The relevant RFC is Wikipedia:Requests for comment/NOINDEX just for ease of access. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:26, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, this is a pretty big issue. The thing is, under bugfixes we've made it does appear at Special:NewPagesFeed, the software we're developing to augment S:NP. Problem is, as it isn't finished we haven't widely socialised it, so people don't do most of their patrolling through there (although I'm happy to go in and individually patrol your article).

My suggested way forward would be to roll back this change until we've fully socialised Special:NewPagesFeed and have an idea of if people are patrolling through it, and to what degree. Does that make sense to you? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:28, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

It would make complete sense. I've seen a large number of indexing questions at the Teahouse and IRC, it appears like it is a result of the new system. This is also going to require a major increase in patrolled pages. In fact, I would propose implementing something that marks a page patrolled if it isn't patrolled for 7 days to ensure that a page isn't noindexed permanently. Will the new system list it at Special:NewPagesFeed when it is moved to the article space? I haven't done much new page patrolling recently, but I have used new pages feed before, and I believe there was a difference in the language used when you patrol a page. Does this change its patrolled status at all? Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:34, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, pages moved from [namespace] to [articlespace] are listed at S:NPF; the idea was to avoid that annoying bug where nothing from say, AfC actually appears. The idea is for it not to change its patrolled status; something unpatrolled in [namespace] becomes unpatrolled in [articlespace], something patrolled becomes patrolled, so on - if it's not working, do let us know! I'll talk to the devs about the rollback now :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:37, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

What I mean is, if I mark Ryan Agung Saputro as reviewed using NewPagesFeed, is it marked as patrolled? In addition, will rolling it back remove the noindex tags from pages previously unpatrolled? Thanks for your quick response, I honestly expected some sort of "consensus was created so we can't undo this". Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:41, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Quite frankly, consensus was to make patrolling less of a hassle, and NOINDEX will do that when we get this sorted. But if it's going to create more of a hassle until then, I'm not going to sit here going "but it's theoretically better and people liked the idea!" ;p.

Patrolling in one most definitely should in the other; if you see any cases of that not happening, do let me know :). The issue is with this specific type of articles (articles created in [namespace] but moved to [articlespace]). In Special:NewPagesFeed, they're displayed under the "article" queue where, lets be honest, almost all the patrolling goes on. But in Special:NewPages, they're going to be in the "User" namespace, where almost nobody does any patrolling. So while patrolling through S:NP patrolls through S:NPF too and vice versa, things like this are inordinately unlikely to be picked up through Special:NewPages...which, at the moment, is where most people are. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:46, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm sort of barraging you here, but Vincent Price (educator) is also noindexed as is Iván Guzmán de Rojas, an article that already appeared on DYK. I hope that before reintroducing the proposal for unpatrolled articles, we come up with a system for making sure every article is indexed at some point. I do like the Feed, and in my last spurt of reviewing I used it primarily. The red just a prototype message discourages editors from using it in my opinion. Perhaps that should be changed to mention that editors are welcome to use it, but it is not a final project. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:50, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

A good idea :). I think that, to be honest, ever article will get indexed, because pretty much every article gets patrolled. If it turns out that's not the case we can look into technical tweaks. In the meantime, I need to grab a very late lunch (Subway, woo!) and then patrol those articles and write that email to the devs. Thanks for this discussion; let me know if you have other thoughts/ideas/questions/bugs! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:54, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Have a good lunch, in the meantime, I'll throw out one proposal. If this is going to happen, a message needs to be visible to logged in editors that tells them a page hasn't been patrolled. This needs to be visible to editors who haven't gone through either of the NewPages systems. In addition, a bot of some sort should inform the author of an article that their page hasn't been reviewed after x number of days. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:58, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

There is a longstanding proposal to make the "mark as patrolled" button appear to any logged in user who looks at an unpatrolled page. This was actually written a while back and went live for a while but had to be disabled for performance reasons. If it could be made live at least for Admins and reviewers then we'd see the DYK articles at least being patrolled PDQ. ϢereSpielChequers 17:14, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

• It wasn't performance issues, it was "if we enable this before fixing a hitherto thought-unrelated bug everything breaks" :). Turning it on for limited groups of users would face exactly the same issue. As far as I know we are planning on re-enabling for all autoconfirmed users once we've fixed the snafu. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

What do you think about adding some kind of banner/warn on MediaWiki:newpages-summary, which is displayed on top of Special:NewPages? I think this would make people who are not aware of the new Special:NewPagesFeed to notice it easily. Helder 19:10, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Oh, wow! So, we currently have it planned to deploy such a banner...but we assumed we'd have to hardcode it. This makes things so much easier :). I'll find out what exactly we're waiting for before the big reveal (and therefore when we should modify it). Thanks a bundle! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

What's the status on the rollback? Has it occurred yet? Barry Stuppler is still noindexed as are the other articles I mentioned. Ryan Vesey Review me! 00:06, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Not yet; I'm waiting to find out when, precisely, the next deployment is (if they don't reply by close of business Monday I will be most vexed). I can confirm it'll go ahead whenever the next deployment is :). In the meantime, I've reviewed the article and the other example provided - both should clear soon. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Ryan Vesey Review me! 00:15, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Is there a bugzilla entry which I can follow for the progress? mabdul 12:26, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Afraid not; I handled it via email (slightly speedier. Also less transparent :(). To be honest, there probably isn't much to follow - it's simply rolling back changes that have already been entered into the corpus of code. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:51, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

WP:BN

I left you a response at BN. I hope this helps. Sorry for not responding sooner. - jc37 16:11, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! That's alright; people have real lives and suchlike (allegedly. I've never encountered this "real life" thing myself, and view it with deep suspicion ;p). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Lol, internet connection issues, actually. (What is this "real life" thing you speak of? : ) - jc37 17:49, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

• Fyi: Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_permissions#Reviewer - jc37 22:53, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

More noindex information to be considered

I went to Special:NewPagesFeed and decided to sort from the oldest unreviewed articles. I was surprised to find that the first article was Pale of Settlement from 2003. Interestingly, if you view the source for that page, you will find "robots" content="noindex,nofollow". It still appears in a google search, so I don't know if the tag is really doing anything for articles like that. I just thought I'd let you know so you can do with the information what you wish. I didn't click review so you have a chance to view the source if you wish. Ryan Vesey Review me! 06:49, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Ryan; looks like this is a combination of the noindex bug and also the "anything that is moved becomes unpatrolled" bug (long story, will be a good thing when it gets patched). I've confirmed that the next deployment is for MediaWiki version 1.20wmf6, which should hit enwiki on July 2nd :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:24, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

ATF5

Is giberish i.e. hjkhfdsurubvcknchrhyty or all caps, a hideable offense or should it be flagged as abuse? Dan653 (talk) 00:57, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Hey; sorry, I'm totally out of it today and trying to curl in a ball in a bath of ice or something. I should have a reply for you tomorrow - apologies for the delay! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:51, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

It should probably be flagged; I think we're developing some abuse filters to deal with this sort of thing (any chance you know regex and can help us out? :P.) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 03:15, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Okay, but I've been hiding most of the giberish, all caps, non english, and curses as I thought flagging posts was like saying "Could an admin, rollbacker, or reviewer, look at this and hide it since I can't do it myself". Since we can hide posts ourselves it didn't make much sense to just flag posts like "you guys are fucking assholes, go suck my dick" as flagging, to my knowledge, does absolutley nothing except flag them. Just my thoughts. Dan653 (talk) 21:27, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Multiple flags (I think it's 5?) lead to the post being automatically hidden. At this stage it's not much use, yeah, because we haven't fully released and so the amount of traffic is low. When we have fully released, we're hoping that function will be used by readers and editors without rollbacker/admin/reviewer (rights necessary to access "hide"). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:33, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

NPP

Could you let me know how I can access and use the new NPF tool? I've been away from Wikipedia for a while but as I will be in the USA next week perhaps I ought to have a look at it. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:45, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Special:NewPagesFeed. It's pretty nice actually. Ryan Vesey Review me! 18:47, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

We're still tweaking and introducing new features; I'm gonna warn you, Ryan, Jorm wants to do another design review with it ;p. Man's very much a perfectionist, and we love him for it. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:59, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Kudpung; you can leave any feedback on Wikipedia talk:New Pages Feed, and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Hope you have a good trip wherever you're going. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:59, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Are you ok?

You did a headdesk at RfX proposal. You did another headdesk at NPF. I'm worried about your health. Have any headaches, dizziness, nausea or eyesight problems? You should seek help for a concussion. You should also get a padded desk. Boy, I thought WMF big-wigs had a laid-back and easy job. Oooh, you should headdesk one of your minions instead. Bgwhite (talk) 01:49, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Hello Bgwhite, we meet again. :D Just wanted to mention that he also headdesked here too. Hmm. Jesse V. (talk) 02:39, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Oh, if only I had minions! I have to say, it's not the first time people have suggested I live in a padded environment, although being told I'm allowed a desk is a new one :P. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:00, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

You should really get a new desk. :) ⇒TAP 11:08, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

I am! Moving house tomorrow and planning to pick up something nice for my new digs (this is probably a good time to warn my intertube access will be limited until about Thursday). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:09, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Well, make sure its a strong desk! :P ⇒TAP 11:18, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm thinking something spring-loaded so it'll help me on the upswing. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:21, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

The solution is not to use chipboard. :) ⇒TAP 11:23, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Cardiff

I'm not sure, but I think that this is incorrect. I believe that "shite" is Hiberno-English, not Anglo-Welsh. Thanks! ⇒TAP 20:13, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

ATF5

Is there anyway to search for a users feedback? Dan653 (talk) 19:46, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

A particular user's? Afraid not :(. But feedback should be displaying in Special:Logs and Special:Contributions for individual users now, if you've got a specific username in mind. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:54, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I did, user:cameron Scott, but I couldn't find his feedback in the logs or contribs (unless I missed it), so I ended up going to Special:Articlefeedbackv5 and searching myself. Thank goodness his feedback was close to the top because I was ready to look through the whole list [3] :P Dan653 (talk) 22:40, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Huh; how odd! It could be that it's not backwards-compatible - feedback submitted before the patch doesn't appear. I'll find out; thanks :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:51, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

WMF Ping

I left a note at User talk:Steven (WMF)#Since you appear to know how to do the meta testing... but I thought I'd ping you as well and get your thoughts since I see that you are back. Ryan Vesey Review me! 19:57, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Totally something for Steven's team, yeah :). I'm not sure what work they've done with ref tags or are planning to do, but it's totally in the spirit of their previous work - and, on a more meta note, they've done some really interesting research on welcoming experienced users not part of the core community and the efficacy thereof. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:00, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I desperately wish that the user had their email enabled. He appears to be the type of user who, once pointed in the right direction, would have the knowledge to improve dozens of legal articles, an area that I think Wikipedia is exceptionally poor in. I've wanted to improve a couple of articles, like Resolution (law) (which doesn't mention city resolutions), Book entry, and Local ordinance. All of which are in terrible shape; however, I found them from looking for information, so I'm not the best to improve them. Do you know much about American Law or are you fairly restricted to that of the UK? Ryan Vesey Review me! 20:05, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

A bit, yeah; I wrote the article on the Seventeenth Amendment for example, and I've been desperately wanting to put some time aside for things like the Alien Torts Act and an FA on Madison v. Marbury. Bit smacked for time, alas; I need to finish this [expletive] GA on Thomas Erskine. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Have you ever considered that there may be some form of a paradox in that case? In using Judicial Review, the court made it possible to have judicial review, but there would have been no precedent allowing it beforehand. Wouldn't it be similar to if I wrote a law giving me the ability to write a law? The law I wrote legitimizes itself, but is illegitimate otherwise. This isn't to say that I disagree with the decision, just some stream of consciousness writing that occurred. In any case, good luck on the GA's and FA's. Ryan Vesey Review me! 20:19, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, the real debate on that front came over the preliminary hearing for the mandamus writ; in other words, the hearing to certify the court had status :). So it's more like someone asked you "hey, you've got the powers to write some laws - can I bring you a law to illegalise grapefruit?" and you went "Sure!", thus setting the convention that you consider "some laws" to include "laws about the legality of grapefruit" and would accept said draft laws in future :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:25, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	For answering all of our comments, questions, and proposals on new MediaWiki features with humor. David1217 What I've done 04:12, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Hey, I haven't replied to this one yet! Wait, ohshi- Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

See? That's what I mean ;^D David1217 ^{What I've done} 18:42, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

AFTv5 is a game changer. This will do tons for keeping editors engaged. Thanks so much for contributing.

Erik Zachte (talk) 14:01, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks so much! All credit to Matthias and Fabrice, though - I just tidied around the edges :(. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Reviewer

I just granted you the reviewer right. (I presume you'll find it necessary in the tasks you're working on.) If you would like it removed, let me know.

Also, Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Reviewer has been re-activated, as you can see.

In regards to our discussion of rollbacker, I'll be filing a bugzilla request about this shortly.

Obviously, please feel free to share any thoughts/concerns/questions. - jc37 15:46, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

What does the bugzilla request say/what precise discussion? (sorry, I'm fairly sure I have mild heatstroke. Long story.) Ironholds (talk) 15:49, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

If you mean a request to have aft5 rights removed from rollbacker; such a bugzilla request should and will be denied. The closing admin concluded that "With a few exceptions, everyone seemed reasonably satisfied with letting users with some permissions below administrator hide feedback....There is a strong consensus for that group to be rollbackers". Consensus has it - we ran an open RfC to involve the community in the decision-making as much as possible.

If you want to split it off or remove it from rollbacker that's fine, but you have to show a greater community consensus concluding that it should be done. Without it, we are not going to make the change. I would consider it ethically unfair to ask the community to comment on an idea, accept their conclusion, do their conclusion, and then turn it off because one editor objected. It makes the entire RfC irrelevant and means we've wasted their time. So; find a greater consensus. Then we'll talk :). If you're referring to a different rollback discussion that has slipped my mind, lemme know. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:11, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi.

More than one editor objected. But besides that, I've been keeping you in the loop with all of this, as I said, this is in no way adversarial. I am sincerely sorry if you feel that it is. My goal is to help you see your project be successful.

Anyway, The bug is 38040.

Rather than try to re-explain (as we discussed this at WP:BN), I'll copy what I said in the bug:

Bug 38040

Hi. Recently several additional user-rights were added to the Rollbacker user-group. (See Special:ListGroupRights.) This was done in relation to the poll at Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5/Archive2#Request_for_Comment. (There were apparently 15 total commenters.) I believe that this was of course well-meant. However, the poll in question is by it's nature a "local consensus". To quote: Wikipedia:Consensus#Level_of_consensus: "Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. For instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope. Wikipedia has a higher standard of participation and consensus for changes to policies and guidelines than to other types of articles. This is because they reflect established consensus, and their stability and consistency are important to the community. As a result, editors often propose substantive changes on the talk page first to permit discussion before implementing the change. Changes may be made without prior discussion, but they are subject to a high level of scrutiny. The community is more likely to accept edits to policy if they are made slowly and conservatively, with active efforts to seek out input and agreement from others." What was the wider community consensus in this case? Wikipedia:Non-administrator rollback - The over-all poll is located at Wikipedia:Non-administrator rollback/Poll with the very lengthy discussion on several sub-pages and talk pages, including Wikipedia talk:Non-administrator rollback This was (as you can read) a very contentious discussion. And gained consensus specifically because the user-right group only contained one user-right. (Something similar could be said concerning several other single-user-right user groups given out by administrators.) While I firmly believe that consensus can change, I believe that a recent poll of 15 editors should probably not undo one of over 450 editors. In addition, even in this recent poll, it was suggested that the reviewer user group (a package of several user-rights which also "mark edits") be used for this, rather than rollbacker. And it could be suggested that the poll itself was not clear about this (even the nominator appeared to not be sure about this.) I understand being enthusiastic about the upcoming roll-out, but as you can see here Wikipedia:Bureaucrats'_noticeboard#Granted_local_rights_to_WMF_staff (another well-intended, enthusiastic project - which appears to be taking community concerns very seriously, and is working on resolving the related issues), the community would appear to jealously protect their right to approve such things. And subsequent to this, Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Reviewer has been re-activated, and people are already requesting the reviewer user-right in preparation for this. So there is also no "need" for rollbacker to have these extra rights, (except the understandable want to have a broader editor base of those who have these rights). So anyway, I'm requesting that these "extra-user-rights" be removed from rollbacker until a clearer (and broader) community discussion may be had. As an aside to this issue, autoconfirmed and rollbacker were given: Feature/Resolve feedback (aftv5-feature-feedback) However, reviewer was not. This appears to be an oversight, rather than intentional. So I would also ask that this be fixed and assigned to reviewer. Thank you for your time, jc37

I hope this helps. - jc37 20:29, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Response

Thanks for the detailed rationale :).

So, there seem to be two sort of spheres of debate here. The first is whether or not there was consensus and if so, whether it overrules the other (older) decision. the admin who closed the discussion certainly felt there was consensus; he actually stated that "With a few exceptions, everyone seemed reasonably satisfied with letting users with some permissions below administrator hide feedback....There is a strong consensus for that group to be rollbackers", so this is the part of the RfC with the strongest support. The participants in the RfC also seemed satisfied with the outcome, and clearly felt it was a valid conversation to be having or they wouldn't have participated :). So really it comes down to "can consensus from this group of people overrule an older decision".

My opinion? It can. The example used in the "wider consensus" principle is wikiprojects, deciding that notability policies don't apply to them. This speaks volumes to me; it doesn't say that you can't alter consensus unless you have more participants than in the discussion that set it (this would be silly; if I fail RfA with 200 participants and then pass with 130, is it invalid? Have I not proved consensus wrong?), merely that it is inappropriate to claim consensus from a discussion or body that contains very limited groups of editors. You can't have a wikiproject throw out the notability policy, because it's a conversation the wider community should be having, not just those interested in (say) subterranean basket-weaving :P.

This isn't to say small or limited groups of the community can't set policy or decide consensus (AfD is proof of this), merely that when the wider community has spoken on a subject, it should be the wider community that later speaks up and says "we've changed our mind". It's about wideness of participation across demographic lines, not just numbers. And that's what this RfC had; participation across demographic lines. I see admins, non-admins, even an ex-arbitrator participating, many of whom hadn't previously been involved in the conversation, in a decision that was advertised as widely as possible through newsletters, portals and as an RfC. That's a wider consensus.

Now. We could still apply the older RfC (on rollbacker) in 2008, but it was a completely different time, and the actual support for the implicit argument that rollbackers shouldn't have other abilities is unclear; there was no closing statement by the administrators who concluded there was consensus to say "and this is what people's motivations seemed to be". In a way, that's indicative of the issue with applying that RfC - it comes from a different time, different circumstances, with different community conventions.

The effort administrators put into the Pending Changes RfC close only a few weeks ago shows that software changes and the duties of admins when deciding consensus in relation to them is treated very differently these days. I don't think it particularly helpful to apply a decision that is old, unclear and (at best) implicit, and policy would seem to agree; "consensus can change" says quite clearly that "matters that have been discussed in the past can be raised again, especially if there are new arguments or circumstances that were not properly considered before" (italics mine).

That's what we've got here; new arguments and circumstances. That RfC is from 2008, was clearly closed under very different circumstances from those that would be considered conventional today, and since it was passed a lot of things have changed. AFT5 didn't exist back then, and neither did anything entirely analogous to it, so it wasn't a tool that users would have been able to consider. The demographics of the community were certainly different (we wouldn't be working on the editor engagement projects if they'd remained the same!) and, all in all, we're dealing with a completely different place. I appreciate and am grateful that both of us are, in our own way, attempting to protect the right of the community to have a voice in software decisions, but for the reasons outlined above, I'm going to have to ask the developers to deny this request.

If you feel strongly enough about this to want this changed, there's only one requirement - hold a new Request for Comment. If you open up a new discussion over whether or not these rights should be included in the rollbacker usergroup, and it concludes that they shouldn't, I'll abide by it and ask my managers to do the same...subject to technical requirements or limitations I'm too much of a dumbass to understand :P. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:57, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

You know, I'm looking at the ridiculousness of this situation.

I started writing a (rather lengthy)... what to call it... "something" concerning the consensus/"wiki way" on Wikipedia.

I've been in "clarification mode" for a rather long time, it's become a standard habit.

You've been around a long time (This account to 2011, and ironholds since 2008, dunno what other account since 2006 as your user page notes)

So you very likely understand consensus well enough to know that an rfC with a small group of commenters isn't going to overturn a previous community-wide RfC even if it was from nupedia days. And "local consensus" isn't limited to WikiProject discussions. XfD and RfCs are just as held by it, policy discussions in particular are held by it.

But even without all of that. The goal should always be to minimise disruption. And so if there is a problem with a user-right potentially causing disruption, I would think the appropriate plan of action would be to revert to the "stable" version, and discuss it. Not bully our way forward and discuss it while going "live" with it. Somehow I don't think that BAG would be thrilled with that idea for bots, for example.

Look, you're WMF. I can explain policy til I'm blue in the face, but I'm also not stupid.

We can start the RfC if you like. My bugzilla notice serves fine as the intro. But in my opinion, if you plan to go live with this before the RfC is done, then there's really no point.

I'll leave that final choice up to you. Enjoy. - jc37 04:39, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

You haven't demonstrated that the userright will cause disruption, and the people who got together to decide if people should have it clearly didn't think so. Yes, we're probably going live before the RfC is done, but we're already live, just not on most pages; we certainly won't be ramping up to 100 percent of articles until after an RfC would be done. I encourage you to start such an RfC if you think it'll have a productive outcome - if it comes out that people don't want rollbackers to have the right, but some people are annoyed by the right being taken away when they'd previously been able to use it, I'm happy to shield you, hold up my hands and say "mea culpa". In the meantime, if you know of ways to encourage editors to participate in a discussion that we didn't try (short of a CentralNotice or whatnot), please do point them out - I'm always looking to improve the breadth and depth of editorial participation in decisions like this. As you say, I've been around a long time; I'm not just a staffer. I'm an editor, and consider myself an editor first and foremost. I don't want to disenfranchise wikipedians if it can be helped. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 04:46, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

I did, though I can accept that you disagree with the interpretation.

Anyway, as I said above, I'm leaving the final choice to you. I'm not going to continue to argue/debate with a paid WMF representative. That just seems kinda foolish imo. You seem well-meaning if perhaps (to my viewing) a bit biased in your hopeful enthusiasm. Nothing incredibly wrong with that, been there myself : )

I'll clarify a couple things, but otherwise, as I said above, I leave this to your discretion. - jc37 15:43, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Time (being the healer of all things) has gone by.

I have a question. My presumption in the above (why I felt it foolish for me to argue with you) is that this is applying to the decision. Am I mistaken? - jc37 00:21, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes and no. Yes because, well, it's a technical decision made by the developers; they change the config files at the direction of their bosses, the userrights change. In theory, it is a decision we could make without consulting the community. In practise - look, I've been an editor for 6+ years now, most of those as just an editor (I've been contracted here for, I think, 9 months and change). I know how silly a decision that'd be, both for practical reasons (people would get totally up in arms about it, and for good reason) and ethical ones (we owe a duty to involve editors in decisionmaking wherever we can, because we're a bottom-up organisation, not a top-down one). So generally speaking, I think editors should be able to disagree and I think editors should at least be asked their opinion before a change is made. That's what I believe, and that's why I held that RfC.

That's also why arguing with me is likely to be futile :). Not because this is a WMF decision, not because this is my staff account, but because we asked people what they want and they said "give this to rollbackers too". I believe this was a perfectly valid expression of the community's opinion on the subject, and that it's much more applicable than the 2008 RfC, which was held when the community was in a much different state, addressing an (in some respects) radically different question, and not explicitly prohibiting these actions. So I'm not going to be persuaded by appeals to that, and it's not me you should be looking to persuade - if you want the situation to change, as said, hold your own. If you don't want to do that, I'm stuck in a situation, hired as a person to ensure the community was listened to, where the only way out is to ignore the opinions of those editors who spoke up when presented with the opportunity. And I'm not going to do that. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:59, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

You're not ignoring their opinions or wasting their time, since there was more to the discussion than rollback.

(As an aside, and nothing untoward meant towards the closer, but I'm not sure that the consensus there was quite as clear on rollbacker as you suggest.)

And I do feel that this in a sense treats the discussion to initially approve the rollbacker group like a "bait n switch", essentially deceiving the commenters in the previous discussion. And I would say this regardless of what additional user-rights were added to rollbacker. Not merely the ones you proposed.

But anyway, ok. So I guess we should start a discussion. Believe it or not, I really dislike drama, but I suppose I'm willing to forgo that dislike for the community's sake.

Do you have a preference on how this should begin? Or on what page you would prefer it? - jc37 15:49, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, the consensus there was clear as far as the admin who closed it felt; if you have a problem with that, I'm merely mimicking his assessment. You should take it up with him :). And it's not a bait and switch at all; that discussion was held almost four years before we started developing this tool. What your argument seems to be is "that previous discussion should have bound the community and the foundation to, for all eternity, follow it, regardless of if there are future discussions" - and that's simply not how consensus works. Consensus does not have the ability to substantially alter the consensus model.

On the RfC front, I would suggest a dedicated page that covers the topic neutrally; it has to be merely a question of "should rollbacker contain this right". It'd be very easy for us to head down a path into discussing related things; "should old consensus bind the community following substantial community change", say, or "if so, what constitutes substantial change - what is that metric" or "what is the metric for a new discussion that overrides an old discussion", or "can implicit rather than explicit expectations that are secondary to the asked question bind the community in the future". We can discuss these things, but if we do the discussion will never end and if it ever does there's unlikely to be a firm consensus - everyone'll get distracted on more meta issues. If this RfC concludes "hey, we should remove the userrights", that'll probably fly (unless, as stated, the more technically-minded members of the engineering department bring up issues). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:14, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I'm a firm believer in consensus can change. I just don't think that that previous consensus was taken into account at all in the close. And that I mildly differ in opinion with the closer (which is not uncommon, as we allow for "admin discretion" in closes) concerning rollback. And (as I noted already), that the local consensus should not overturn a broader consensus, per policy.

Anyway, restatements aside...  : )

And nod, A direct question of: should rollbacker contain more user-rights than rollback. That should be clear enough I would hope. - jc37 17:09, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I was thinking of "should it contain these AFT5 rights", but your question actually makes a lot more sense. If they say no, the previous consensus to include AFT5 rights is overridden and should be implicitly disposed of. If they say yes, AFT5 is acceptable, but it opens up more possibilities in the future - I like! Direct, sensible and more nuanced in the outcome :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I haven't forgotten about this, just still thinking about it. I also have been researching/reading various past discussions. (Reading archives is not pleasant. Seems the bots archive by last edit not by how they may have been arranged on a page.) - jc37 20:56, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

"Feature spam"

Why have you been reverting my recommended guidelines for monitors? I was being bold, and maybe you should assume good faith. This has helped somebody who was confused about AFT5. Now what the heck does feature spam have to do with my tips? I was simply sharing good advice. I hope you understand a bit more about what I was doing now, and you should really assume good faith, because I can't assume you're doing anything to my contribs but destroying them. --J (t) 14:46, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh lord, I'm an idiot! Feel free to re-instate it; for some reason I missed the "What you should not do" heading and read it as "you should feature spam and profanities". *headdesks*. I'm so sorry! :(. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:52, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I prefer *facebook*. --J (t) 00:40, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Don't you mean *faceplant*? :P Of course, it may be appropriate to use the Picard double-facepalm of destiny when the epic fail is so strong that a single facepalm simply won't cut it. Jesse V. (talk) 01:37, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

• facebook*. Or *facepalm*. Or *deskslam*. Or *getgun*. Or *POW,POW*. Oh dear. (BTW: This is not a suicide note so don't take it as one.) --J (t) 02:59, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

• My favourite is the Illogipedia block reasons, which include "BAM, HEADSHOT" ;). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:16, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

What would really help AFT5. A lot.

Hello, sir. I have two stories.

Short story: It would be easier for me to respond to a user without featuring or hiding a comment, so that there is a sense of two-way communication. Sounds like a forum, but it's seriously easier, because I don't like posting on people's talk pages. --J (t) 23:47, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Long story: I regularly maintain Temple Run, and when I saw it had AFT5 enabled on it, I was real happy. What made me real upset was that there were anonymous users complaining about Wikipedia's lack of piracy links, one stating they couldn't find the release date (which is right on the infobox). Now, since I wrote the book about hiding comments, I couldn't really hide that comment (or else risk being called a hypocrite) and I'd be forced to write on their talk page that the release date was August 5, 2011 for iOS and March 27, 2012 for Android. This is really, really annoying. If AFT5 included a feature to respond to users (instead of just thumbing down responses), it would be 100 times more helpful than the current version. AFT5 replaced the starring system with words, so why can't responses be words too?

Thank you. Also, apologies about my anger about the guidelines I put up. I saw your response and it no longer makes me think you were a WMF contractor with no experience with WP policy. --J (t) 23:47, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

You've got mail!

Hello, Okeyes (WMF). Please check your email; you've got mail!
Message added 02:27, 14 July 2012 (UTC). It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

-- Luke (Talk) 02:27, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Recent changes feed?

Hi. I just noticed Wikipedia:New Pages Feed. Is there a similar feed for recent changes with review function (independent of "pending changes"?). -- Anthonyhcole (talk) 06:38, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Apologies for the quietness!

Hey guys

Sorry for the delay; I'm just on my way home from Wikimania now :). I should land in London at about 9am BST Tuesday, and be home to Cardiff before the US west coast wakes up (albeit only just). Once that happens, I'm going to work through the discussion backlog and start forwarding things to the relevant staffers as fast as possible :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

PAGENAME and BASEPAGENAME

Not sure if you know this, but some of the messages you left used PAGENAME when BASEPAGENAME might work better (or just using subst:PAGENAME). I found this out when archiving my talk page and noticing this. The edit I noticed that used BASEPAGENAME was this one. Though I now feel guilty I didn't take part in that survey! Carcharoth (talk) 04:41, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Good point! Included in my mental tutorial for sending these things out :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:11, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Another issue with noindexing

So, I think this issue should be considered when we reinstate the noindexing of unpatrolled pages. It seems to affect their google search rankings, which I believe to be one of Wikipedia's biggest assets. Do a google search for Barry Stuppler, instead of the top 3, he appears at the bottom of the search. I did notice that the source for my page shows noindex, but does not also say nofollow. Could we modify it so that the pages had "noindex, follow" rather than "noindex, nofollow" and would that solve the problem? Ryan Vesey Review me! 19:21, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure; mind if I get back to you tomorrow? From past conversations with the devs, google has a very unique way of spidering through our pages because of the volume and rate of change of our content, so follow/nofollow may not make a difference. But this is definitely something we should look into fixing - I'll talk to some people when I'm back in Blighty :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

No problem, there's no rush. On another note, I'm subscribed to an email list, and one of the emails I got mentioned that your panel discussion will be remembered as one one of the most productive of all of Wikimania 2012. Ryan Vesey Review me! 19:47, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Ooh, link? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:27, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I forwarded it to you, your panel was mentioned in the 3rd email I believe. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:36, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't realize it was online. Link Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:37, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Heh; thanks kindly :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:41, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

AFT5

Hey Oliver, hope you aren't entirely jetlagged. Is it possible to add AFT5 to individual articles? I wanted to see what people think of South American dreadnought race. ;-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 21:53, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Not got on the plane yet! Awesome unexpected business class upgrade is awesome (particularly when it comes with lounge access and free wifi). Try adding Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles to it :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:29, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Why must you make me hate you every time I speak to you? ;-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 02:48, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Because I'm awesome. Furthermore, maths. I SAID GOOD DAY SIR. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:34, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Doncha worry, my historical pen is mightier than your mathematical sword. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 06:05, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

The people who say that have clearly never been hit by a sword. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:05, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Mathematical swords are multiple sheets of paper taped together in the shape of a sword. The name is taken from complex mathematical equations which are featured on the paper but have no use in the real world. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 08:51, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

AFT5 User Warnings

Hi Okeyes, per the dicussion on WT:AFT5 a couple of us have written user warnings, would you be able to take a look and let us know what you think and what we need to do next (ie is there anything official you need to do; do we need to talk to WikiProject User Warnings, etc). The warning templates we've come up with are at User:Callanecc/sandbox/AFT5 (the associated talk page has some stuff as well). Regards, Callanecc (talk • contribs) talkback (etc) template appreciated. 12:48, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Hello, Callanecc, we'd like you to participate in the making of the guidelines. --J (t) 15:45, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

• Replied on the AFT5 talkpage, Callanecc :). Thanks for the work you guys have been putting in! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:46, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Another section about AFT5

Do you know if there are any plans to create a system where editors can be notified of feedback to watched pages? I would love to read the feedback if it exists, but don't have time to go through all of the articles. Ryan Vesey Review me! 23:05, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

There is :). At the moment we're looking at a link on your watchlist which will take you to a special page which lists "all feedback from all articles on your watchlist". That may/may not be an interim solution depending on what people think of it. Ironholds (talk) 23:13, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Wrong account, dude.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 00:16, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Guh; Oliver Fail. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:06, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

"Misbehavior" at article feedback

So, I haven't issued a warning or anything along that line, because I really don't know how to deal with this. Jeffwang left feedback for Justin Bieber here and featured his own post. I'm sure that is unacceptable and unfeatured it, especially since it was soapboxing and an issue better left for the talk page. Any thoughts or am I in the wrong here? Ryan Vesey Review me! 03:52, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Right call, you are in the right. One, the feedback should have been placed on the article's talk page not through the feedback tool (and I would expect an experienced user to know this). Two, as soon as it was posted Jeffwang should have left it alone and not touched it (goes back to WP:INVOLVED, if you are involved in the incident (since he posted it) you don't do any admin (or this case Monitor actions). Callanecc (talk • contribs) talkback (etc) template appreciated. 06:45, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I'd put it under WP:INVOLVED/WP:COI, but always assume good faith. Was he just testing all the buttons? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:09, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure. I didn't realize who the editor was before, but later realized that I've had some odd experiences with him (introducing unsupported information because every Wikian would know it was true). Check the bulky process he now has for posting on his talk page. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:12, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Then ask him :). I'm gonna stay out of it because I really don't want "staffers feel it is okay to get involved in social/community/behavioural discussions" to become a norm, but I hope you reach a decent outcome for everyone. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:18, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Do we have a way to find all the feedback of an editor? He featured his own post again here. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:33, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Should appear in his logs, same as other non-edit actions :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:35, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, hiding, unhiding, featuring, marking as helpful/unhelpful, marking as resolved, and flagging as abuse all appear in the logs. Introducing feedback is considered an edit. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:41, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah; the alternative was confusing the hell out of the Checkusers, apparently. I'm not too knowledgeable about that extension, but I trust Risker a heck of a lot and she felt it was important to have edits and submissions in the same place. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:47, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Could we consider a tag on feedback, similar to the "section blanking" and other tags? That way you could filter someones edits for the tag Article Feedback or something along those lines. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:53, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

That'd work! That's set via the abuse filter - you might want to talk to one of the regex-knowledgeable people (edit filter managers); it's not within my skillset, I'm afraid :(. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:50, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

I notified Wifione Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:53, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

On the Jeffwang topic, I new I'd see trouble. I go through his convoluted leave a comment process only to be forced off of his talk page. Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:56, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

• Oh dear :(. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:57, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Hence my proposed caveat on the guidelines development talk page about WP:INVOLVED (which I think to be an appropriate policy to reference because of the power our tools give us; like admins over other editors). Callanecc (talk • contribs) talkback (etc) template appreciated. 10:00, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Blank feedback

Hi Oliver, I know there was a discussion about this on WT:AFT5 so I thought I'd leave a comment here. I found a blank piece of feedback which had been marked as helpful by the tool. See Special:ArticleFeedbackv5/Pacific Islands Forum/169739. Regards, Callanecc (talk • contribs) talkback (etc) template appreciated. 08:32, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, that's just..confusing. I'm going to email it around and find out if it was a test or whatnot. Thanks for bringing it up :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:15, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

The current theory is that it's part of a known bug we'll be bumping up in importance :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. Callanecc (talk • contribs) talkback (etc) template appreciated. 16:16, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

ay ef tee

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!

heather walls (talk) 05:53, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

• Hugs! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:50, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	Thanks for helping with my issue over at WP:AFT5. Your help is greatly appreciated. -- Luke (Talk) 15:21, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I try my best :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:39, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

AFTv5's Version of a G1

I've seen a few posts of random characters today. Should I hide them? Thanks, Electriccatfish2 (talk) 20:58, 20 July 2012 (UTC).

Well that is the question isn't it :), see Wikipedia talk:Article Feedback/Guidelines. Callanecc (talk • contribs) talkback (etc) template appreciated. 21:09, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

As always, Callanecc gets there first ;). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:22, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm just too quick for you Oliver :). Callanecc (talk • contribs) talkback (etc) template appreciated. 21:30, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Callan is fine. Callanecc (talk • contribs) talkback (etc) template appreciated. 21:59, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Still nothing!

Hey dude, sorry to keep bothering you with this (I don't know who else to go to). That merch still hasn't arrived, months down the line. If you prefer I can speak to you on Skype (not right now). I've not even had an email from the merch team. Cheers, Osarius Talk 23:47, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Huh; weird! Okay, I'll drop them all a note (can you email me just so I've got the right address to give them? google tells me I've got 3,042 emails in my inbox, and that's a lot to wade through to find it!) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:03, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Sure, coming right up! Osarius Talk 00:11, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Hello, Okeyes (WMF). Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

 ;) Osarius Talk 00:13, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

mail

Hello, Okeyes (WMF). Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

Puffin ^{Let's talk!} 13:12, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Some questions

Hi! Is there a way of filtering out (un)registered users' feedback? And what about leaving a note to registered users once their feedback has been resolved? ツ benzband (talk) 09:44, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Good ideas both; in my email to the team :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:56, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikimania

I have absolutely no recollection at all of having seen you around anywhere in the conference venue. I do know that several people mentioned to you on my behalf that I was looking forward to meeting you. I was at the GWU including the hackathons and the unconference from 09:00 to at 18:30 every day. Most of the time in the Ballroom or the food room as I felt that personal contact was a higher priority than attending a lot of presentations. FWIW, travelling to DC and back from Thailand via NYC both ways, and the accommodation, was also no joke, and not entirely inexpensive. I call that commitment. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:43, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't think I ever questioned your commitment, Kudpung. I know what expensive commitments are like; I paid for my flight both ways, along with living expenses and accomodation for both me and another staffer out of my own pocket, without the benefit of a scholarship. And yes, you did see me around; I walked right up to you while you were talking to Howie and called out your name. I was a foot away. You ignored me.

Actually, no, nobody mentioned you were looking forward to meeting me. One editor did say they had to introduce me to you to convince you that I quote "wasn't satan", which I found particularly rude - I don't know if it was the wording you used, or merely the sentiment - and I did hear the rather bizarre rumour spread around that I'd left on the third day solely to avoid you. So no, I got no hints that you wanted to speak to me. I got plenty in the other direction, however. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:54, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

NewPagesFeed

Have you given any thought to creating an option in the new pages feed for articles to appear only if they are x minutes old? This could help with any biting issues. Ryan Vesey Review me! 13:23, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

What would we do about attack pages that should be deleted as quickly as possible? --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:41, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I've got to agree with Kudpung on this; the priority has to be to get rid of the real junk. We could maybe have a timer on the non-urgent kinds of deletion template (so, anything that isn't attack or copyvio, say) if people feel that strongly about it. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:45, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I considered that, which is why I think it should be optional. Ryan Vesey Review me! 13:49, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

But then there's the question of "are the people who would actually benefit from having around going to use it?" Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:41, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Refrshing AFTv5

Hi Oliver! How do you refresh Special: ArticleFeedbackv5 to show the latest feedback? Thanks, Electric Catfish 15:40, 23 July 2012 (UTC).

"Hit F5" ;p. We're looking into adding a refresh function now, as it happens! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:44, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Also, would you be able to make comments that are hidden/featured part count as part of edit counts, as I'm going for RFA in January and I want voters to be able to see the work that I am doing relating to handling feedback? Thanks, Electric Catfish 15:49, 23 July 2012 (UTC).

Probably not :(. It's sort of like patrols in that regard; it does appear in the logs, but not in Special:Contributions. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:55, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Electric, you can view your AFT5 activity here. Just give them that link. (the NPP log that Oliver mentions is here) benzband (talk) 17:30, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Category watchlist

Hi!

I saw this coment and though you might be interested on this tool: CatWatch. Best regards, Helder 21:37, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

That's really cool! Thanks :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 05:10, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia user interface and helping new users

I saw your discussion with Kudpung here. Re. the Wikipedia user interface, I have a few brief suggestions for simple and easy-to-implement improvements. Would you be interested in seeing a summary?

For example, Wikipedia's search defaults have long since been abandoned by Google—Google seems to have concluded that it's more productive to offer users a choice of search results (title plus snippet) rather than forcing a jump to a keyword match or article title.

Although it would be easy to offer (as an option) guidance to new users— like incrementally improved landing pages for people who don't find a match in search, and are told that they can create an article, or people who click on a red link—Wikipedia editors seem fatalistic about trying to get this implemented, and maybe people on WikiMedia are not interested in testing usability or using web analytics and A/B tests. LittleBen (talk) 05:33, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Who are you referring to with "on Wikimedia"? :). I'd be very interested to hear any ideas - I would note that the improvement we're looking at with the landing page most certainly won't be incremental! And A/B testing and quantitative analysis generally are things I'm a big fan of, and the same is true of most of Engineering, I'd think - we always try and build some sort of testing or analytics into our work. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:03, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

TIA (Thanks In Advance) for listening. Wikipedia search problems, as I see them:

It appears that the search box is at top right when one is logged out, but upper-middle left if one is logged in (inconsistent, have to hunt for it). The search box for users who are not logged in should work the same way, and ideally be in the same place, as the search box that logged-in users get.

If you enter a search term, in both cases, you might get an AJAX drop-down list of article titles, but the default seems to be to jump directly to the article if there is a keyword match. (When logged in, you can click "Go" or "Search", but "Go" is the default if you simply hit return). If you enter a popular search term and there is a match, you will be bumped directly to the article which matches that name, regardless of the article's quality. Web design is one such example. The view stats show it as being extremely popular — web design is a popular keyword — even though it has been evaluated as being of low quality. If new users are not presented with choices but rather bumped to a poor-quality article then many won't stick around to try to work out how to search for related articles. Google Search used to have an "I'm feeling lucky" button, which is equivalent to Wikipedia's "Go", but Google has long since removed it. So my conclusion is that it would be better to display search results (title and snippet) as the default, and give the user a choice, rather than jumping directly to an article. The other advantage to this approach is that you can provide links to Wikipedia Help (How to search, Advantages of having a Wikipedia account, etc.) on the search results page.

If there isn't an article title match, the user is told, "there isn't an article by that name, do you want to create one", or the like. The potential author is not shown any guidance like "[Click here to see the] Advantages of first creating a Wikipedia account", "[Click here for] Guidelines on article naming", "[Click here for] Wikipedia search help", or "[Click here for Tutorial on] Using search engines for research"

Basic search does not search categories (if you want to search categories then you have to know how to bring up Special Search, and you have to know to click on Advanced) so you will not discover if there is a Category that exactly matches your search string either. It would help if the user were told, "there isn't an article by that name, do you want to create one, or to search Categories for (search term)", or presented with a category link in the search results if a Category title is an exact match. It would also help if Categories were aliased up one level in Special Search so as to be displayed next to Advanced. As a result of people not being able to work out how to search categories, terminology (e.g. article titles and category titles) is often inconsistent. Just one example: There are Web browser engine and List of web browser engines articles, but there are nine Comparison of layout engines (XXX) articles, and the category is Category:Layout engines. People are naming new articles—and renaming existing articles—inconsistently because they can't figure out how to search for all related articles and categories. LittleBen (talk) 08:24, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Good points all :). On the interface front - I know Brandon is plotting out a new interface for Wikipedia which should resolve the inconsistencies. Re search, I think(?) that there are some people working on that; regardless, want me to drop the head of features engineering or platform a line and see if I can find out more details? :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 08:29, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, please. That would be much appreciated. I think I'm good at seeing things from the viewpoint of an idiot user, and making suggestions for simplification ;-) Stuff that is insanely easy—and fun—to use gets a lot of love. LittleBen (talk) 08:38, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Search is incredibly important. Arguably the biggest improvement in Windows 7 was search. Instead of having to learn the interface, and remember where everything is, you can simply search for it in your favorite language—and the corresponding setting, control panel, image, document file containing the text snippet, whatever, will appear in the search results. Wikipedia hides stuff like MoS in a different namespace that most users take a while to find. Interested to see Brandon's page. I resurrected the Wikipedia article on Responsive Web Design, which somebody deleted as being of no significance. LittleBen (talk) 08:58, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I'll give him a poke :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

On the trend to mobile: many of the articles are far too long to be comfortably read on a mobile device. It seems that, in future, one solution would be to have really good, compact "Executive Summaries" at the tops of articles (I saw a discussion to this effect somewhere). Maybe there aren't enough editors capable of doing this. However, there's WikiProject Outlines, and the problem might be mitigated if they wrote "Executive Summaries" for articles instead of writing outlines—but the people who look after articles and the people who do outlines are unlikely to agree to combine their efforts in this way. In some cases there are three different versions — a portal, e.g. Portal:Japan, an article Japan, and an outline Outline of Japan. People who Google for "Japan" are only going to find the article and not the portal or the outline, it's a regrettable duplication of effort. As it's unlikely that the three separate groups are going to agree to merge their work, probably the best compromise would be for them to agree to permit hatnotes to be used to link the three together—maybe external pressure would be required for them to agree to this. But the small-screen mobile user maybe could be shown the outline first, peppered with links to expanded sections in the other two... LittleBen (talk) 12:05, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, lead sections should act as outlines - and the mobile view does have everything except the lead automatically collapsed. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:06, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Our design team is definitely thinking in this direction for future skin changes. Some of the (very tentative!) mockups I've seen are aimed at presenting more mobile-friendly summaries of articles on the first click, and then allowing users to toggle between the just-the-facts and the full tl;dr versions. Very good to see that this isn't a completely radical unthought-of idea :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

On the search front; looks like we don't have any dedicated staffers at the moment, but are hiring one. I'll give you a heads-up when I hear more on that front :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 07:33, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• The basic essence of my search suggestion (above) is that (1) it is a trivially minor change to the present interface that (2) would cost almost nothing to try, but (3) is likely to have a huge positive benefit (I'd bet on it).
• To be more specific: The existing search box has two buttons (two modes), "Go" (jump directly to article title) and "Search" (display a page of search results), with "Go" as the default if you enter something and hit return. The suggestion is simply (i) change the default search box mode from "Go" to "Search", and (ii) display Wikipedia search help and Wikipedia recruiting-related "advertisement" links on the right of the search results, like Google does with Search ads. The Wikipedia "advertisement" links could include "[Click here for] Wikipedia search help", "[Click here for Tutorial on] Using search engines for research", "[Click here to see the] Advantages of creating a Wikipedia account", "[Click here for] Guidelines on article naming", "Visit Wikipedia:Teahouse, "Volunteer to patrol Wikipedia and remove spam", and the like.
• There is no need to switch completely, it is better to use A/B testing to test this suggestion (by sending a tiny proportion of users to a page with the modified search box). I'd be willing to bet that this would prove the payoff of changing to be huge: fewer bounces (people who immediately quit the page they land on, or exit Wikipedia) and more volunteers for editing and spam patrolling. LittleBen (talk) 12:06, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Point :). Okay, if we're talking an experimental test; I would recommend User:Maryana (WMF) or User:Steven (WMF), who are the community people for the experimental software team (I refer to it in my head as "skunkworks", but I'm informed if we call it that we get the bejesus sued out of us. Grr.) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:09, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• Comment - I completely agree with you about the brokenness of our current search function, and I think pieces of the work involved in fixing it will be integral to various features projects (revamping the article creation workflow, for example). However, I suspect that this is more of a dedicated user/early editor/mobile problem, rather than a general readership problem, because my assumption is that most people (excluding mobile users) never use that search box and just use Google to find Wikipedia articles. I could be wrong though; as a first step, it would be good to get the numbers on how many searches are actually performed via the box, and how many of them end in a click on a search result. I'll ask around to see how hard it would be to get that data. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

• Thanks for the response. I think you'll find that—although people may arrive at Wikipedia as the result of a Google search—people who don't quit Wikipedia immediately tend to use the internal Wikipedia search (if they can find it on the page). People who are not logged in—new users, and people who haven't signed up—will see the Wikipedia search box displayed at top right, where it is very noticeable, and use it. Most of these new users are not going to work out how to find Wikipedia search help. So that could be one of the things "advertised" at right of search results. It would also be possible to provide context-sensitive help, like any exact-match category or portal. For example: if somebody searches for "japan", Category:Japan, Portal:Japan, and maybe Outline of Japan links could be displayed as context-sensitive help "advertisements". Categories and Portals are unlikely to be found otherwise, as they don't appear in the top Google or Wikipedia search results. LittleBen (talk) 02:23, 27 July 2012 (UTC)