Recently "Technology reports" have abounded with different stories arising from the Git switchover on March 21; it can be easy to miss the wood for the trees when negotiating one of the largest changes to their workflows developers have experienced in years. To assist in establishing the current "state of play" when it comes to the switchover, the Signpost caught up with Chad Horohoe, the WMF developer responsible for managing the switchover.
Chad, are you happy with how things have gone so far? Would you have done anything differently, and if so what?
The move to Git has probably sounded rather abstract to many Wikimedians. What can they expect in the way of tangible differences?
Technology Reports since "Git day" have included coverage of some of the issues that have arisen since the switchover. How confident are you that once developers get used to the new way of working, those concerns will be resolved?
In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson bemoaned the fact that getting agreement on the design for a new bikeshed is uniformly more difficult than getting agreement on the design of a nuclear reactor; though fewer people are affected, the entire community (in Parkinson's case a committee) are willing and able to give their opinion on the matter. MediaWiki tries to avoid this problem by allowing logged-in users to choose how they wish the proverbial bikeshed to appear to them, but it is often not enough: participants still argue over how interface elements should appear to the overwhelming majority of users who are not logged in.
Such was the situation this week as the English Wikipedia's Technical Village Pump became a forum for discussing the changes to MediaWiki's default diff colouration and formatting schema, brought in last week with the local deployment of 1.20wmf1. Predictably (see previous Signpost coverage), the result was much consternation and fierce debate (as of time of writing, it seems as though the new global default will remain the default on the English Wikipedia, albeit with possible tweaks).
Design controversy is nothing new to Wikimedia wikis, however. In May 2010, for example, an update to the famous Wikipedia "puzzle globe" logo caused pages of on- and off-wiki debate. Indeed, it was an episode that bore all the hallmarks of the present diff colour discussion: the change was primarily aimed at fixing an objective problem (incorrect characters) but also incorporated purely aesthetic changes, and hence sparked disagreement. In the end, the logo was adjusted slightly to respond to the criticism of it by Wikipedians, but the update was not reverted. It was around the same time that the Vector skin was rolled out – first optionally and then as the default for all users – prompting a similar number of complaints. These complaints included those of one user, still an active Wikimedia Commons editor, who wrote that "the kind of morons with no place whatsoever in Wikipedia ... I expect donations to plummet in reply to this change".
Not all central changes have stuck, either: the furore over a change to the colouring using in the new messages bar prompted it to be widely reverted. Of course, the correct analysis of this historical record is itself a controversial issue; commentators seem split between those who feel that controversy is a part of the design process that can't be eliminated and those who feel that it can be, but that developers and designers have never tried hard enough to eliminate it. One thing is certain, though: with design changes of some sort or another occurring on an increasingly rapid basis, it's rarely been a more topical issue.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
Recently "Technology reports" have abounded with different stories arising from the Git switchover on March 21; it can be easy to miss the wood for the trees when negotiating one of the largest changes to their workflows developers have experienced in years. To assist in establishing the current "state of play" when it comes to the switchover, the Signpost caught up with Chad Horohoe, the WMF developer responsible for managing the switchover.
Chad, are you happy with how things have gone so far? Would you have done anything differently, and if so what?
The move to Git has probably sounded rather abstract to many Wikimedians. What can they expect in the way of tangible differences?
Technology Reports since "Git day" have included coverage of some of the issues that have arisen since the switchover. How confident are you that once developers get used to the new way of working, those concerns will be resolved?
In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson bemoaned the fact that getting agreement on the design for a new bikeshed is uniformly more difficult than getting agreement on the design of a nuclear reactor; though fewer people are affected, the entire community (in Parkinson's case a committee) are willing and able to give their opinion on the matter. MediaWiki tries to avoid this problem by allowing logged-in users to choose how they wish the proverbial bikeshed to appear to them, but it is often not enough: participants still argue over how interface elements should appear to the overwhelming majority of users who are not logged in.
Such was the situation this week as the English Wikipedia's Technical Village Pump became a forum for discussing the changes to MediaWiki's default diff colouration and formatting schema, brought in last week with the local deployment of 1.20wmf1. Predictably (see previous Signpost coverage), the result was much consternation and fierce debate (as of time of writing, it seems as though the new global default will remain the default on the English Wikipedia, albeit with possible tweaks).
Design controversy is nothing new to Wikimedia wikis, however. In May 2010, for example, an update to the famous Wikipedia "puzzle globe" logo caused pages of on- and off-wiki debate. Indeed, it was an episode that bore all the hallmarks of the present diff colour discussion: the change was primarily aimed at fixing an objective problem (incorrect characters) but also incorporated purely aesthetic changes, and hence sparked disagreement. In the end, the logo was adjusted slightly to respond to the criticism of it by Wikipedians, but the update was not reverted. It was around the same time that the Vector skin was rolled out – first optionally and then as the default for all users – prompting a similar number of complaints. These complaints included those of one user, still an active Wikimedia Commons editor, who wrote that "the kind of morons with no place whatsoever in Wikipedia ... I expect donations to plummet in reply to this change".
Not all central changes have stuck, either: the furore over a change to the colouring using in the new messages bar prompted it to be widely reverted. Of course, the correct analysis of this historical record is itself a controversial issue; commentators seem split between those who feel that controversy is a part of the design process that can't be eliminated and those who feel that it can be, but that developers and designers have never tried hard enough to eliminate it. One thing is certain, though: with design changes of some sort or another occurring on an increasingly rapid basis, it's rarely been a more topical issue.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
Discuss this story