User:Peter Damian/Keilana interview

Interview streamed live on 30 Sep 2013

00:21 – not for the easily embarrassed.

01:38 – the VE was shut off because of a showdown between folks in the community and the WMF staff.

01:55 – refers to the RfC opened by the community.

2:20 – Lih mentions James Forrester, 'manager of the VE', saying it was a 'pretty impressive thing that they did', although 'it was not bug free'.

2:30 Lih: 'for the seasoned and veteran editors, it didn't do everything they wanted, it didn't do references and templates well, it didn't do, ah, tables at all'. Emily: 'Images were a huge problem, anything that wasn't very basic text, bold italics, was … not functional for a long time'.

3:00 Lih: 'So a lot of power users were eager to use the original editor. Now the funny thing is that the people who know how to use WP could just hit 'edit source' – there's a button to do this, you could disable the VE if you want to, it was 'opt out', meaning that by default you were unable to use this thing, but they kept pushing for the VE to be turned off as a default, and it came to this RfC .. which was mostly a poll of seasoned editors – how would average or newby editors know about the RfC – and it was very much against the VE, around 400 to 100 votes, for making it opt in'.

4:00 [Lih] 'And so this basically led to a showdown between the Foundation, which said this is a long term goal to make everything easier, we going to have this VE, and the community which through this RfC said no we don't want it. So what do we do … and what happened was this one particular user Kww said, based on the output of this rfc I am just going to put in javascript to disable ve for everyone … '

4:35 [lih] 'This created a little hand grenade thrown into the whole equation here and that's what happened this past week. Some of the folks at the foundation looked at the code and said we are not actually in favour of you doing this but, especially because that code is really inefficient you are going to bang the API quite heavily and it's going to be very disruptive to WP, you might actually create lots of problems .. but the end result was – I don't know whether it was just kww or other folks supported this, the foundation just took out the javascript but then yielding to the community they said OK we are going to disable VE as a default, we are going to go with what you guys, the community [want], even though James Forrester .. and some of the other folks involved in the Foundation said this is a mistake .. so that's where things were left.'

5:40 – Tawker notes the VE was not for the 'power folks'.

6:20 [Emily] 'One of the first entry points for most people is like 'I noticed a typo and I fixed it', and a lot of people – I heard anecdotes, I know the foundation has collected real data on this, um, you know, I've heard of people like 'I wanted to fix WP but I clicked the edit button and it was really confusing and I didn't know how so I didn't. Um, and I have seen people use the VE like [finger dance] 'in the wild', and if you are just correcting a typo it's super easy. I think that's better than the source editor for doing minor edits like that and I use it for my minor edits just cause like there's less hassle and if I'm looking like 'I need to add a link here' instead of having to run through a search the text .. but Tawker's right, there's almost this divide between the power users and the occasional users. There's the issue of IP 'discrimination' as one might wanna call it, and there's the idea that like people who aren't regulars are often labelled as sockpuppets even if they follow wiki politics and just never say anything about it because, to be honest, who wants to say much about wiki politics all the time'.

7:40 [emily] 'Um, and I think that there's a lot of value in having an easy entry point and if I remember correctly, I went back and read some of the discussions about VE on the wiki and they were favourable [?] on the idea, and I can't quite believe that the implementation has been [finger dance] so bad as to turn the majority of the community against it. Like, I agree that there were problems, and I've not been quiet about what I think those huge problems are, but I really think that, you know, the idea was from the community and we were the ones who initially liked it.

08:26 [Lih on how much easier VE is than all the crazy markup and crazy code] 'Maybe we are just blind to the fact that newbies and IP editors and everyone are using this and are finding this a much better experience but we don’t have feedback from these folks and the foundation is trying to do user testing in this area, they actually do a lot of this kind of stuff, but this is just a big problem of the community either not really understanding or respecting foundation resources being put into this.

10:00 [Tawker]

10:30 [Emily] 'I think that in lieu of those statistics, er, we've got a political, we've got a social problem. Um, Wikipedia society, for lack of a better word, the population [here is the look that struck me as dismissive], whatever, I'm in a sociology class, that's why I'm confused [?], um, is a very insular population, and you [pauses] earn political capital by participating in the high profile discussions, um, and I think that the reason the power users are able to totally overturn this is because they have [pauses] they have earned this capital, um, and it's very, um, it's just indicative of the larger problem that I feel we're going to talk about very soon, it's the rift between the power user community, the central community, the 10% or whatever, and the WMF, and the community feels maligned it feels slighted, they feel overpowered, um, by the foundation and by what the foundation sees as their mission, and what the foundation sees as unwelcome, badly thought through of things that they think are really good for the movement and good for the project, and this culture of 'you have [archly] betrayed the power users, if you work with the foundation, or the foundation is working against us and we need to fight the man is [giggle] I find it to be very problematic because, um, when we step out of the petty politics and all the petty drama and all the RfCs and the shouting on Jimbo's talk page, we're all here to do the same thing, um, and the foundation has ideas about how that thing should be done and the users have an idea about how that thing should be done and I think they mostly align and people are forgetting that, they're forgetting that forest for those trees, and I think that that's really upsetting and really problematic.

12:35 [Lih] Talks about certain corners of Wikipedia were you only find certain sets of power users. So there may be very functional dialogue about VE, for over a year, with paid employees going through user testing … but then there's this completely different parallel thing with the wiki world which has RfCs, power users … RfC can basically usurp all this other work which has been done with lots of time & energy etc, it's amazing .. [mentions Bradley Manning case]. Kww used the RfC system to shove his javascript down people's throats, and now we have VE gone.

15:50 [Lih] 'This whole RfC thing is really internet geek talk'. [Emily: 'yeah'] 'RfCs are like the Internet Engineering task force, it's really weird. [To Emily] what did you make of RfCs when you first saw them?

16:05 [Emily] Um, I don't remember the first RfC I saw, I do remember that a couple months into my editing experience, um, I found the WP project space pretty quickly, um, and I feel like in today's world I would have been branded a sockpuppet for finding it so quickly. Um, but I remember reading an AfD and really liking the idealism of using a consensus process and having a discussion, ah, but it was kind of confusing and kindof overwhelming, because it's really easy for .. a 12 year old girl to understand how voting works… you learn that in school, you never learn consensus, especially not in the American educational system, which is very black and white, at least at early ages. So, it was kind of confusing … kind of scary when I first started, Omigod I'm going to get hate mail … it took a while for me to get over that hump of how do I participate in project space and be a member of the community and not get kicked out'.

17:25 [Lih on Rfcs 'its like a whole bunch of testimonials]

17:35 [Emily] 'The first time I saw an RfC I was just like 'what is going on here', cause it was like someone says 'I think this person is terrible and should be banned' [or] 'I think this person writes nice articles and – why are we doing this and

18:20 - Lih on the obtusenss of RfCs and how this is where it has gone with VE. He didn't that any of this had gone on until after the fact .. where did VE go, what happened, shouldn't we get fair notice?

20:15 – Tawker on RfA page as a nuclear wasteland.